What's new

According to its developers, Alpha 8 is a work in progress and the release introduces improvements in almost all the components as well as in the common infrastructure. With all the applications undergoing big changes - bug fixes and new features.

With KOffice 2.0 under "heavy development" it is not meant to be used for any real work and may crash at any time.

Among the technology developments are improvements to the OpenDocument format, particularly the text shape that is the base of KWord thanks to the full-time work of the NLNet-sponsored Girish Ramakrishnan. KOffice can now save and load images and KPresenter has support for playing sounds. This means that a presentation will be able to contain sounds that will be played during a presentation.

KPresenter also now has support for notes.

However, according to the developers not all of the new technologies will be fully implemented in the first release, 2.0.

First impressions

KOffice 2.0 Alpha 8 is quite sluggish on Windows XP, even more so than OpenOffice.org on the same computer. This performance is unlike that for Linux where KOffice is well regarded as being faster than OpenOffice.org.

As this is alpha software you can expect it to be a little unstable and the odd crash was experienced with this release.

All up, KOffice looks like it has a great future on all three popular desktop operating systems. The developers need to focus on optimization and stability for it to be a real hit.