The KDE Project today announced the latest version of its open-source office suite. KOffice 1.5 now uses the Oasis Open Document format as the default file format. The majority of the programs directly compete with applications in Microsoft's Office suite. In addition, the suite has improved accessibility features including mouseless operation and text-to-speech translation.

Traditional KOffice applications like the KWord word processor and KSpread spreadsheet programs are still included, but two brand new applications have been added. Kexi is a personal database program that can be compared with Microsoft Access. It can generate single database files and is able to import data from SQL or MS Access. KOffice also includes a beta version of KPlato, which is a free project management/planning applications.

KOffice's source code can be downloaded for free, but Debian, Kubuntu and Suse Linux users may want to download and install the precompiled binary files.

Humphrey Cheung