KOffice 1.2 Beta Released

The KOffice team announced the availability of KOffice 1.2 Beta 1
late this afternoon. The long anticipated beta, the first major
release of the open source office suite this year, brings many
improvements that greatly increase KOffice's usefulness.

While last year's KOffice 1.1.1 release was ported to KDE 3.0
earlier this month, this release is the first to directly target
the third generation KDE desktop. As such, this new release
benefits from KDE 3-specific features including bidirectional
(“bi-di”) text support for right-to-left languages like Hebrew.



The most notable improvement in KOffice 1.2 Beta 1 is the new
WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) display in KWord and
KPresenter. This insures that these applications will finally
show documents on screen like they will appear once printed.



Additionally, KWord has gained many other features including
better image-box editing, the ability to layer frame objects, and
auto-correction. Mail merge functionality also makes a welcomed
appearance in this release, along with better customization of
shortcut keys. KWord made strides in filters as well with the
addition of WordPerfect and MS Write import filters, Lotus AmiPro
and PalmDoc import/export filters, and improved HTML
import/export functionality.



Other core KOffice applications improved their feature lists in
this release too. KPresenter, the PowerPoint-like presentations
program, gained embedded audio support, page thumbnails, and a
handful of new transition effects. The spreadsheet program,
KSpread, was also polished up with support for larger
spreadsheets (over 32,000×32,000 cells in size) and thirty-seven
new text and math functions.



KOffice's growing feature list is finished off with support for
the standard SVG vector graphics format and a thesaurus for KWord
and KPresenter. While the suite is still a bit on the light side
when compared to more mature packages such as OpenOffice.org,
KOffice 1.2 seems to work on closing this feature gap.



As noted in our review of KOffice 1.1.1 back in December 2001,
those who do not require more then basic Microsoft Office
interoperability may already find KOffice suitable. Overall,
while the suite lacks some complex features, its intuitive
interface seems perfect for most basic office work.

At press time, the KOffice beta was available for the Mandrake, SuSE, and Connectiva flavors of Linux (others may become available over the next few days). These packages, along with the source code, are available at KOffice's web site.

-Timothy R. Butler