New KOffice beta beefs up MS Office filters
September 16, 2009 in News, releases by Alastair Otter
The KOffice team today announced the second beta of the upcoming 2.1 release. The KOffice community has now switched from adding new features to only fix the remaining bugs, and that is obvious from this release. The first beta of 2.1 was released without any fanfares, but it marked the transition into the bugfixing stage.
Something that is not obvious from the changelog is that there has been much activity in the MS office import filters, especially for MS Word and Powerpoint. Many new formatting features have been implemented in both these filters. We expect KOffice 2.1 to be better at reading MS file formats than any previous KOffice version.
See the announcement and changelog.
Better M$ Word import would be good – I have given up on KOffice after briefly trying 2.0 (I know, that was basically a preview release), as it often crashed importing M$ Word documents. I did not have the time to file bug reports, and stayed with OpenOffice.org instead.
Debian experimental at present only has KOffice-2.0.81 – which I assume is beta1. I’ll wait for beta2 and give it another try.
KOffice has always had nice “lite” feel to it as compared to OOo. I look forward to trying a later beta too.
Been meaning to try Koffice. I hope it will faster than OOo.