| KOffice 1.5 nears with RC1 release |
Mar. 29, 2006
 The KDE Project Wednesday announced the availability of KOffice 1.5-RC1, the first release candidate for KOffice 1.5, scheduled for general release in April. The project team shipped Beta 2 of KOffice 1.5, the final beta planned for the current product cycle, on March 14.
KOffice is an integrated office suite for KDE that offers free and open standards for its document formats, component communication, and component embedding. This release candidate will lead to the final edition in short order, the team said.
Improved support for ODF
In RC1, KOffice developers have used feedback from the Beta 1 and Beta 2 releases to improve support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) and interoperability with OpenOffice.org, among other programs. KChart is the program that is most improved, because its implementation was the least mature; it is still lacking in some areas, the team said.
Increased use of ODF is widely regarded as one of the most important developments in the IT industry right now, the team said on its website. ODF will give users worldwide the ability to control their own documents and ensure that all documents will always be able to read at any time in the future, the team added.
The v1.5 RC1 release includes the following key features, according to the project team:- a frame-based, full-featured word processor (KWord)
- a spreadsheet application (KSpread)
- a presentation application (KPresenter)
- a flowchart application (Kivio)
- an integrated database application (Kexi)
- a new project management application (KPlato)
- a pixel based image editing and paint application (Krita)
- a vector-drawing application (Karbon14)
KOffice v1.5 RC1 also includes these embeddable objects:- a business-quality reporting software (Kugar)
- full-featured charting engine (KChart)
- mathematical formula handling (KFormula)
- a built-in thesaurus (KThesaurus) and support for many different file formats.
To see a detailed list of improvements, go here.
A number of Linux/Unix vendors have provided binary packages of KOffice 1.5 RC1 for some versions of their distributions, the project said, and in other cases community volunteers have done so. Some of these binary packages are available for free download from KDE's http and ftp mirrors.
The latest stable version of KOffice (1.4.2) is available for download, here.
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