Open source office suite KOffice hits 2.0, gets Firefox-like addon support

KOffice is the open source, cross-platform office suite that isn't OpenOffice.org. You may not have heard much about KOffice unless you've used a Linux distribution using the KDE desktop environment. But KOffice and KDE have come a long way in recent years. You can run KDE apps like KOffice in Windows, although installation is still a lot simpler in Linux distributions like Kubuntu or OpenSUSE.

This week the KOffice team released a preview of KOffice 2. It's not really aimed at end users yet, and KOffice 2.0 is actually missing some of the features found in KOffice 1.6. Most of those features will return in versions 2.1 or 2.2. But the new version does have a number of new features, including:

• Better integration between applications
  
• New GUI designed to work with widescreen monitors
  
• Support for Windows, Mac, and Linux
• Native support for OpenDocument Format

It's also much easier for third party developers to create add-ons that will add new features and customizations. The goal is to make these add-ons as easy to install as Firefox extensions.

KOffice includes a word processor, spreadsheet utility, presentation manager, project management softwre, a vector graphcis editor and a raster graphics editor.

[via Slashdot]

Tags: kde, koffice, koffice-2.0, opensource