Last night (November 19th) the KOffice team announced the third beta release of the upcoming KOffice 2.0 open source office suite for KDE (K Desktop Environment) users, and not only. This new beta introduces improvements in all its components, such as Karbon, Krita, KPlato, KChart, KPresenter, KSpread, KWord, the KOffice libraries, and plug-ins. It also repairs many of the issues related to the non-translatable strings, and improves the layout of many dockers.

"KOffice is in beta because the development team wants to receive feedback and bugreports from actual users. Since the last beta release a significant set of improvements and speedups have been integrated for all applications and this release shows the continuous focus on bug fixes until 2.0 is released." - said the KOffice team in the official release announcement.

Highlights of KOffice 2.0 Beta 3:

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.

And now for the bad news, we want to inform everyone that the KOffice development team decided to include only the following components in the final version of the KOffice 2.0 project, because of their maturity:

· KWord - A frame-based word processor capable of professional standard documents;
· KSpread - A powerful spreadsheet application;
· KPresenter - A full-featured presentation program;
· Karbon14 - A vector drawing application;
· Krita - A pixel-based image manipulation program like The GIMP or Adobe Photoshop;
· KPlato - A new project management application.

For a full list with all the changes since the Beta 2 release, please visit the official changelog.

You can download KOffice 2.0 Beta 3 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.

Kubuntu/Ubuntu 8.10 packages are also available, here. Discuss this article in this thread.