KOffice 1.4 Announcement

June 21, 2005 (The INTERNET). The KDE Project today announced the immediate release of KOffice 1.4 for Linux and Unix operating systems. KOffice is an integrated set of free office applications based on the award winning KDE desktop. KOffice is a light-weight yet feature rich office solution and provides a variety of filters to interoperate with other popular office suites such as OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office. In fact the KOffice 1.4 release is a large step towards embracing the OASIS OpenDocument file format which has become an approved standard for office file formats. This format is also used by the upcoming OpenOffice.org 2.0, thus providing high interoperability.

KOffice 1.4 consists of the following applications:

New applications in the 1.4 release:

• Krita - A pixel based image manipulation application
• Kexi - An integrated data management application

Improved existing applications:

• KWord - A frame-based word processor
• KSpread - An advanced spreadsheet application
• KPresenter - A full-featured presentation program
• Kivio - A Visio-style flowcharting application
• Karbon14 - A vector drawing application
• Kugar - A tool for generating business quality reports
• KChart - An integrated graph and chart drawing tool
• KFormula - A powerful formula editor

This full set of integrated components makes KOffice one of the most complete office suites available.

The greatest highlights in the 1.4 release are:

• Krita and Kexi, two new applications.
• Integration of the OASIS OpenDocument file format, which has become an accepted standard.

Other major improvements include a completely rewritten Excel filter which can import Microsoft Excel files very well. KChart has received many improvements, making it much more usable and functional than before; KPresenter now supports master pages and custom slide orders; KWord now offers much faster spell checking, a new Word Perfect import filter and tooltip based autocompletion. And Kivio has improved stencil support.
There were also many bugs fixed with notable ones like printing bugs in KSpread as well as many more.

KOffice is the first office suite supporting the OASIS OpenDocument to a large extent.
These filters are provided for thorough testing while still using the KOffice native format as a solid and known to work choice for documents. Switching to the OpenDocument format as the new native format is planned for the next release when these filters are known to be rock solid and functional. With this in mind the current KOffice release provides the OASIS OpenDocument filters.

Principal Improvements

The principal improvements over KOffice 1.3 are:

• Krita: Krita is an image editor and paint application with a wide range of applications, from photo editing to the creation of original artwork. Sporting a clear and uncluttered interface (for a paint app...) it makes the features it delivers accessible and intuitive to use.
  This is the first public release of Krita and while it provides a coherent set of features, it is only the first stepping stone towards a flexible paint application for artists and image editors.
  For a list of features supported by Krita, see the Krita information page.
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