KOffice 2.0 Beta 4 released [LWN.net]

Version2.0 Beta 4 of KOffice has been announced. "This fourth beta brings significant bug fixes, improved stability, improved usability following the discution that have happened at the Berlin KOffice Sprint. The goal of this beta is to allow testers and users to stay up-to-date with the work of the developers and keep providing usefull bug reports. 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."

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KOffice 2.0 Beta 4 released

Posted Dec 12, 2008 14:22 UTC (Fri) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (7 responses)

Has the MS Office file support improved at all? At least for me, this is one of the most critical features of any office suite.

KOffice 2.0 Beta 4 released

Posted Dec 12, 2008 15:13 UTC (Fri) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (6 responses)

Not since the previous beta, but during the summer of code, quite a bit of work has been done on
support for images in .doc documents, and the Marijn, who works on KSpread, tells me excel
support has improved too, compared to 1.x.

That said, MS Office file support is not important to us. We focus on supporting ODF instead. While
there is documentation for the old binary fileformats available nowadays, it's still really hard to
support them well, also because in order to support the file format, we'd need to support all the
features as well. And I doubt we'll ever support OOXML -- given that Microsoft has folded and
joined ODF nowadays. And, according to David Faure, they're even making some useful and
pertinent contributions :-)

KOffice 2.0 Beta 4 released

Posted Dec 13, 2008 8:42 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

If MS Office support including OOXML is not a priority, I am afraid, KOffice is not going to be very useful to a whole lot of people. That's a valid choice if you want to remain a niche application targeting a different set of users however.

KOffice 2.0 Beta 4 released

Posted Dec 17, 2008 12:39 UTC (Wed) by chomee (guest, #47060) [Link]

That OOXML matters is simply not true - even in MS-only environment people have already switched back to office 2003 file formats.

Office 2007 is seen mainly as eye-candy, any real production work is done in DOC et al., and file exchange is done in PDF. So native PDF export seems to be more important.

KOffice 2.0 Beta 4 released

Posted Dec 13, 2008 21:35 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (2 responses)

Is there any decent batch OOXML -> ODF converter?

KOffice 2.0 Beta 4 released

Posted Dec 14, 2008 9:04 UTC (Sun) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

I think Microsoft and Novell were or are working on one: I know that
Michael Meeks once posted a cry for help because he needed to debug a
humongous xslt script that converted from one to the other. But in the end,
the applicability would be limited because there are no ooxml documents in
existence (because .docx etc are not ooxml...)

KOffice 2.0 Beta 4 released

Posted Dec 14, 2008 14:10 UTC (Sun) by mbulik (guest, #55581) [Link]

ODF will be supported by MS Office 2007 SP2 :

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2008/may08/05-21...

KOffice 2.0 Beta 4 released

Posted Dec 15, 2008 20:58 UTC (Mon) by stephen_pollei (guest, #23348) [Link]

googling "David Faure odf microsoft" didn't find a mention of these useful contributions. Does anyone have a link to some details about that? I know that some were worried about them joining the odf working group and causing problems like they did at ISO. It would be nice to have something that adresses those concerns. Being involved with odf in a constructive fashion is what ms should have been doing much sooner imho, however the key word there is constructive.

Key KOffice Developers Talk About KOffice 2 and Open Standards and KOffice's stance against OOXML more practical than political, developer says both mention that ooxml is likely to not be supported, even if it became an ISO standard. I think that is a wise choice; ooxml is a horrid specification that should have never passed through a fast track process.