The KOffice team announced on November 24th that, after six months of hard work, the final version of their KOffice 2.1 open source office suite was now available for download on mirrors worldwide. The new version brings numerous improvements over the 2.0.0 release and, as usual, some new features, such as the ability to run on the Nokia n900 smartphones (based on Maemo Linux).

KWord and KPresenter have now better import filters for the Microsoft Office and Powerpoint documents. The KPresenter tool also received support for slide numbers and infinite canvas. Support for the OpenDocument format (ODF) has been greatly improved in KOffice 2.1, which can now handle lists. In KWord, there are more advanced tables, with support for nested tables in tables. Moreover, applications such as KSpread, KPlato, Karbon and Krita have received many improvements in various areas.

"Our goal for this release is to show the public the current state of KOffice and create a platform for further improvements. This release is mainly aimed at developers, testers and early adopters. It is not aimed at end users, and we do not recommend Linux distributions to package it as the default office suite yet." - was stated in the official release announcement by the KOffice development team.

KOffice is an integrated office suite that utilizes free and open standards for its document formats, component embedding and component communication. The KOffice suite is composed of the following applications:

· KWord Word processor;
· KSpread Spreadsheet manager;
· KPresenter Presentations creator;
· KPlato Project management tool;
· Karbon Vector graphics editor;
· Krita Raster graphics editor.

The developers stated that KOffice 2.1 did not yet have all the features present in the older 1.6 release and that they would implement them in the next release, KOffice 2.2. Missing applications will also be added in one of the future versions of KOffice!

Download the final version of KOffice 2.1 right now from Softpedia.