Today, Nokia released the first public version of the office document viewer for the Nokia N900 phone. It was uploaded to the Maemo repositories. This version supports text files, spreadsheets and presentations in OpenDocument format (ODF) and Microsoft Office formats. The viewer requires the latest update (PR1.1) to the N900 software. You can install 'Office Viewer' by adding the maemo-devel repository to your N900 catalogues:

Catalog name:

Maemo Extras-devel

Web address:

http://repository.maemo.org/extras-devel

Distribution:

fremantle

Components:

free

Then the application 'freoffice' will be available in the category 'Office'. The install is 9 megabytes.

With the viewer, you can open multiple files at once, open office documents from your e-mail, search in office files and copy and paste from your documents. A very nice feature is the ability to give presentations with the phone. Here are some screen shots of the viewer running on the N900.

The code for this viewer is available in the KOffice repository. New releases of the viewer will be uploaded to the repository as KOffice progresses towards version 2.2.

The viewer has a simple user interface and responds quickly to user input such as page changing and scrolling.

It is one case to walk through 7000 pages of rather technical documentation and to try to extract something useful out of it for a concrete question. It is another thing to look at the actual XML produced by the Microsoft Office 2007 suite.

Kross, the scripting framework, is one of the pillars new with KDE4. While the project started already a while back in 2004 it enveloped over the time to a rather big codebase. During the KDE4-process one of the main-goals was to decrease the codebase what can be even more difficult then writting new code.

In the category of scripting in KSpread 2.0 using Kross2 the KSpread 2.0 Scripting article provides an overview of what's possible with KSpread based on Qt4+KDE4 this days.