OpenOffice isn’t the only open source office suite around, Calligra has nowreleased a stable version.
Calligra is a descendent of the KOffice suite which is part of KDE’s collection of software. Like KDE it was based on Qt and was open source and free. Calligra is essentially a continuation of KOffice, in fact the previous stable release was KOffice 2.3.
Which isn’t to say that this is a minor release. Over two years in the making, Calligra comes with a number of new features, and new user interfaces that make it an exciting release.
First of all, there a number of new applications added to the suite in this release; a diagramming application called Flow, and a note-taking application called Braindump are entirely new. Secondly, the text layout engine has been rewritten, and since it is used all over the suite all applications are improved. The UI for most applications has been simplified, support for the ODF format has been improved, and the suite now handles Microsoft formats better.
One of the most interesting developments though is the availability of mobile and tablet versions of the office suite. The tablet version of the suite Calligra Active is in development for the upcoming tablet developed by KDE. KDE Plasma Active, the OS running on the tablet not only features an interface designed for tablets, but a number of applications are also being developed especially for that form factor, this is one of them. Currently it does not support editing documents.
The mobile version is only for the N900 though. In fact, the document viewer in N900 and N9 is based on KOffice itself.
Until recently, this office suite had not been available for Windows, however that is no longer the case. A version for Windows is in development, and in fact the second release candidate is already available for download. You can download it for the OS of your choice from here