KOffice 2.3.0 Office Suite Released

While there is now the Calligra Suite following an internal KOffice fork by its developers, having been released today is KOffice 2.3.0 that includes the work leading up the formation of Calligra. KOffice 2.3 features include Krita being certified as ready for use by professional artists, better support for reading Microsoft Office files, a new report engine in KPlato and Kexi, and much more.

The KOffice 2.3.0 official features include:

- Krita is now ready for professional artist use. This is thanks to the very focused effort by the Krita team after a meeting which resulted in a clear vision and well defined goals. More details are available in Krita 2.3.0 announcement
- A new slide sorter view in KPresenter, which has been greatly missed by some users. There is also a new shape animations feature for KPresenter.
- Improvements of the core engine and plugins in the support of the OpenDocument Format. Especially text rendering has seen much work.
- Even more improved support for reading Microsoft file formats (doc, xls, ppt, docx, xlsx, pptx).
- A new report engine used in KPlato and Kexi.

There is also a more complete list of changes. The KOffice 2.3.0 release also has improvements to its underlying libraries and plug-ins, including more complete support for the OpenDocument specification.

While there is now the Calligra Suite, the KOffice 2.3 release announcement mentions details about KOffice 2.4 still, with usability enhancements on the horizon due to a usability expert joining the project. This release of the KDE office suite is coming two weeks after Oracle put out OpenOffice 3.3.