The fourth development release of the open source KOffice office suite was announced last night (December 10th) by the KOffice team. The new beta was made available after the Berlin KOffice Sprint meeting, and it introduces various stability and usability enhancements and compelling bug fixes, in all of its components, such as Karbon, Krita, KPlato, KPresenter, KSpread, KWord, the KOffice libraries, translations and plug-ins. KOffice 2.0 Beta 4 fixes the support for loading OpenOffice.org Presentation's text styles, and it is possible (again) to insert images in a text document and paint on mask in Krita.

"It is really, really time to start helping the developers, by testing and finding bugs, by writing documentation, by helping out with the website or even by helping to get KOffice release ready by writing code and fixing bugs. We intend to release the very first version of KOffice2 in a few months: so let's pull together and make this a great platform for productivity software!" - said the KOffice development team.

Highlights of KOffice 2.0:

Unified Look and Feel

A new and improved GUI layout (Graphical User Interface) was created for all KOffice's components, in order to suit today's wide LCDs. The new GUI layout is made up of a workspace and a sidebar where users can dock the tools. For full flexibility, the docked tools can be undocked and kept in their own window, and later redocked. Moreover, the session will be saved and reused the next time KOffice is started.

Platform Independence

The KOffice suite is now available for Linux (KDE and GNOME), Windows and Macintosh users, while Solaris/openSolaris is to follow soon, after the final release. KOffice 2.0 was build with the latest KDE4 libraries and the Qt Cross-Platform Application Framework version 4 from Nokia, which acquired Trolltech at the beginning of this year.

Native Support for ODF

KOffice 2.0 will include native support for the OASIS OpenDocument Format, also known as ODF, the ISO standard for office document interchange. Why? Because the OASIS OpenDocument Format is now the national standard for many countries from all over the world. The native support for ODF implemented in KOffice 2.0 guarantees interoperation with other office suites, such as OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office.

Kubuntu 8.10 users can install KOffice 2.0 Beta 4 from here. Other Linux users should download and compile the KOffice 2.0 Beta 4 sources right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta release and it should not be used on production machines. It is intended to be used only for testing purposes.