Collabora Office 6.4 – our major release now ready for Android, iOS, and Chrome OS

Cambridge, November 30th, 2020, 12:00 CET – We are glad to announce the new major release Collabora Office for Android and Chrome OS! This release comes with improvements from the recent major Collabora Online release 6.4, and brings a user interface that is easier and more fun to use.

Collabora Office allows you to edit documents directly on your phone or tablet, guaranteeing your privacy and putting you in full control of your data and documents. Our mobile apps are a supported part of our Collabora Office product family and come with every Collabora Office Enterprise subscription.

Collabora Office for Android and Chrome OS is feature rich, providing smooth editing, a polished user experience and lots of design goodness.

Clear and easy NotebookBar on tablets

Using Collabora Office on a tablet now gives you a NotebookBar user interface. With the introduction we are responding to the wishes of our users. They wanted more NotebookBar and less Siderbar, so we changed. Clear tabs with even more explicit feature-icons to tap on provide the same feature richness as Collabora Online in your browser.

 

User-friendly tab layout

The tabs have been redesigned especially for the use on tablets. They refrain from clashing with the iOS status bar and decrease clutter on the toolbar. For a larger view of the document, the NotebookBar can be collapsed by tapping on the tabs.

 

Convenient switch to editing for read-only documents

When a read-only document is switched in editing mode, the user gets a “save as” option, to preserve the original version of the document.

Faster, improved document handling

Other important improvements in this release are the faster loading of larger documents, and improved display of some Microsoft document elements.

Interoperability improvements become available online

Transparent text in a PowerPoint/Impress file
Gradient background in a PowerPoint/Impress slide

With the update to the new 6.4 core, also the numerous interoperability improvements to Microsoft documents arrive at mobile devices and on Chromebooks, such as gradient backgrounds in slides, semitransparent text, and better SmartArt support – all first introduced to Collabora Office 6.4 on the desktop and to Collabora Online 6.4.

Working in multiple documents and more fonts on iOS

Collabora Office 6.4 for iOS is starting to make use of “multitasking” features: it is now possible to have multiple documents open at the same time in the app. A special word of thanks to Adfinis and Nicolas Christener for their invaluable support for making this happen! Another nice win, is that “third-party” fonts, those installed by other apps, can now be selected.

 

The Dark Mode is starting …on Android

We are glad to present the first parts of Dark Mode support on Android! Some elements of the user-interface and background can be changed by choosing the dark theme in the settings. However, when inside documents, the app will currently display the classic light UI.

 

Chrome OS specific UI improvements

  • The floating action button for new documents is larger and moved up, to allow easier dealing of e.g. notifications.
  • The “create new documents” labels can now be tapped
  • Scrolling can now be done with the track pad and touch screen
  • Keyboard shortcuts for cut/copy/paste are now working

Staged releases

Starting with Collabora Office 6.4.0 for mobile, we moved to a staggered release schedule. This means that new versions are made available to users gradually. Version updates will be rolled-out to users in sequential waves, so some will see them sooner than others.

More fixes

Now it is possible to paste images copied from Chrome/Chromium browser. Also, various text area focus issues are fixed, that previously blocked writing in some situations.

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Collabora invested huge effort and resources in the fully functional open source office suite for mobile devices, built on the support of many we appreciate to credit on this page.

We welcome your feedback and questions on the Collabora Online forum! For contributions to testing, translating and development, we welcome you on Collabora Online on GitHub.

 

For use on F-Droid please see this information.


Info on release updates

Read detailed information on updates on Collabora Office for mobile devices on this page.

 

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud, providing Collabora Online and a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow CollaboraOffice on Twitter.

Collabora Online Community Roundup #7

On October 1st, Collabora Online moved to its new home on GitHub, and started settling in the new infrastructure, expanding its fantastic community, and continuing the work to deliver the latest and greatest developments in productivity and collaboration together. Check our new community website for all the details! 😉

Collabora developers also keep fixing and improving our lovely mother project LibreOffice. As all the good work requires some appreciation, let’s take a look at what the seasoned developers of the Collabora team and the volunteer contributors from our community have been doing during the last week.

Week in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last week, 29 authors have pushed 102 commits to master and 193 commits to all branches. On master, 150 files have changed and there have been 2,357 additions and 1,480 deletions.

Screenshot of GitHub Pulse for Collabora Online
Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from November 13, 2020 to November 20, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to SaschaT667, JensTheCoder, BernhardGehl, accolon and Gabriel Filion for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

  • Thanks to SaschaT667 for opening an enhancement request for adding editable and dynamically-calculated formulas support to Writer documents.
  • Thanks to JensTheCoder for reporting an issue about frozen lines in Calc documents.
  • Thanks to BernhardGehl for letting us know about some unexpected log messages from COOL, integrated with Nextcloud.
  • Thanks to accolon for reporting an issue about zoom factors of spreadsheets on macOS Big Sur.
  • Thanks to Gabriel Filion for reporting a bug which caused COOL packages for some distros to fail to start, and thanks to Andras Timar for fixing it quickly.

Thank you all, and welcome aboard! 🙂

Join the fun!

You can also join the fun, and be part of our next list of new contributors! 🙂

Just go to our GitHub repo, fork it, build it (on Linux or on any platform), grab one of our newcomer-friendly easy hacks, and send your first pull request. And if you get stuck at any point, just drop by one of our communication channels. 😉

Highlights

Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #3

COOL Weekly Meeting #3 has taken place on Thursday, November 26, 2020 at 11:00:00 am (UTC) with participants both from the community contributors and the Collabora team. We have got a quick update on what’s going on and discussed matters raised by the contributors, as well as having the chance to say hi to fellow members of the community. Topics discussed in the meeting include:

  • Contextual toolbars for COOL (suggested by Andreas Kainz) got a new patch merged to master with some initial bits of implementation. Andreas Kainz will test it and give feedback.
  • Icon theming for COOL leveraging SVG files (suggested by Andreas Kainz) has been decided to be turned into an issue on GitHub to keep track of the initial work of defining the class names. Below is a proof of concept screenshot by Andreas Kainz demonstrating how two different sets of icons can be obtained just by using two different SVG classes.

    A proof of concept screenshot by Andreas Kainz demonstrating two different sets of icons with two different SVG classes
  • The blog post about iOS app upgrade (suggested by Nicolas Christener) is planned to be written/published when the new upgrade is out. It was also mentioned that new beta testers should ask Kendy for access to the testing versions.
  • Regarding Mobile / iOS versions, Pedro Silva has reported that the Notebookbar for iPad has been improved, and many fixes and improvements have already been included in 6.4 for a more clutter-free notebookbar with better user experience for iOS users. He has also touched up the community website to add a prominent link to the forum.
  • Gökay Şatır has shared some update about his work on CanvasTileLayer
  • Gabriel Masei asked about the ways to avoid duplicated effort, and was suggested to keep in touch with the team in the #cool-dev channel on Freenode, and also participate in the following sessions of the COOL Weekly Meeting. He is interested in contributing to COOL to make it possible to dynamically change between the classic toolbar and the new notebookbar views.

Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the meeting, make your own suggestions for the next meeting, and join us on Thursday, December 03, 2020, at 11:00 am (UTC) to stay in touch with the rest of the community. We’re looking forward to hearing from you live. 😉

Collabora Online (COOL)

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

  • Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for fixing an issue which caused the on-screen keyboard not coming back after being dismissed once in a session in the iOS app. He has also made sure that no auto-scrolling of a page on a Writer document happens if user is making a selection by dragging the selection handles in the iOS app.
  • Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for making sure that plain text content copied from browser is properly pasted without additional characters in the Android app.

Collabora Online Integrations

  • Thanks to Roeland Jago Douma for improving performance of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by making sure extra queries and steps are avoided by obtaining the appdata folder in one go. He has also improved handling of empty files to avoid possible issues.
  • Thanks to Julius Härtl and Andras Timar for reviewing and merging pull requests on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.
  • Thanks to Phil Davis for upgrading phan version on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration, thus helping to maintain a high PHP code-quality for the project.
  • Thanks to Semih Serhat Karakaya for making Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration future-proof by changing the code to use the path from the appManager instead of a static one.
  • Thanks to Jan Ackermann for helping Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration stay up-to-date by replacing some deprecated functions with current ones, as well as making sure the integration app has the correct default name.

Honorable Mentions

  • Thanks to Marc Rodrigues for continuing to keep us updated on various news around Collabora Online and related FOSS projects, and creating a lot of yummy content to read!
  • Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
  • Thanks to Cor Nouws for leading the marketing team, and not stopping there but continuing with testing & reporting bugs, attending to community events, and keeping us all informed about what’s going on. He also attends LibreOffice Design meetings from time to time to help COOL’s mother project LibreOffice have a better UI & UX.
  • Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for doing a lot of research on different topics, and providing mentoring/patch-reviewing/hand-holding/wisdom within the team, in our communication channels, and also on various channels of our lovely mother project LibreOffice.
  • Thanks to Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
  • Your friendly community mentor, Muhammet Kara, is also creating & improving easy hacks, running workshops, helping new contributors solving their setup & build issues and reviewing their pull requests, working on easing the build procedure, improving our GitHub presence bit by bit based on its community guidelines, compiling/composing these community updates…

Translators

Last but not least, we can’t thank enough to our translators who constantly help COOL and its friends talk many languages on this earth. Collabora Online speaks many languages, thanks to all of our translators in our translation project, and all of those who previously contributed and keeps contributing to our mother project, LibreOffice.

We’re continuing to work to find good ways to credit translators’ hard work in the product. Please see a list of those involved, and please get in touch if you’re not listed. Many thanks to all those who have worked on translating Online, you rock!

If you would like to help COOL speak your language, you can just go to our translation project on weblate, and start contributing! 😉

Collabora Online translation project on Weblate
Collabora Online translation project on Weblate

Collabora loves LibreOffice!

We’re still contributing to LibreOffice and encourage you too to do so because LibreOffice rocks. 😉

  • Thanks to Gülşah Köse for making sure documents with text camera z rotation are properly opened and saved for PPTX files, thus improving interoperability with other office suites.
  • Thanks to Miklos Vajna for fixing a bug that caused LibreOffice to not update all preview images on an ODT file after issuing the UpdateAll command, as well as various other fixes for issues encountered while opening certain DOCX files,[0][1] and also for improving PPT support by resolving an issue which caused some images being lost after opening a PPTX file and saving it as PPT.
  • Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.

Jeci and Collabora Online announce partnership for Alfresco Community

Dijon, France – Cambridge, United Kingdom – November 23, 2020 – Collabora, the driving force behind creating the online LibreOffice, ‘Collabora Online’, and Jeci, an IT service company that specializes in free and open source technologies (FLOSS), are happy to announce a partnership around Collabora Online and Jeci’s Alfresco integration.

“We are excited to work with Jeci as our partner” said Michael Meeks, General Manager at Collabora Productivity. “we love their work enhancing collaboration with Alfresco, and the open source spirit of the team.”

“We are delighted to be able to offer Collabora Online as part of our services for Alfresco” said Jérémie Lesage, founder and CEO at Jeci. “With the rich editing and collaboration features in Collabora Online, we are able to create more value for our customers.”

Jeci provides various open source expertise on, among others, containers and software development, with a specialty on Alfresco Community Platform, using Docker for a quick and reproducible deployment. Jeci created an open source integration for Alfresco with Collabora Online, which was also recently updated for Alfresco version 6. Alfresco is the open, cloud-native ECM, to help manage content from anywhere, connect information with users everywhere. Integration with Collabora Online helps businesses in increasing worker productivity, securing online working, and in effectively delivering exceptional customer experiences. You can see how the integration works on Jeci’s youtube channel.

Collabora Online is the powerful LibreOffice-based online office that supports all major document-, spreadsheet- and presentation-file formats, which can be easily integrated in many infrastructures and solutions. Key features are collaborative editing and excellent office file format support. Collabora Online is excellent for enterprises that need a powerful office suite in the cloud, or on-premises, that protects their privacy and allows them to keep full control of their sensitive corporate data. Collabora Online enables Hosting and Cloud businesses to include document viewing and collaborative editing functionality into their service offerings.
Collabora Online can also be used in combination with our PC based office suites: Collabora Office, as well as natively on iOS, Android and ChromeOS. This gives organizations flexibility to choose where to run their Office workloads, without being forced to use third party servers.

For more information about this press release, please contact info@jeci.fr or sales@collaboraoffice.com.

About Collabora Productivity
Collabora Productivity created Collabora Online and therefore is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud. Collabora provides a wide range of products, as well as consulting services for enterprises and governments. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, Collabora is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term support. Collabora’s multi-platform policy is completed with Collabora Office for iOS and Android. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit page on www.collaboraoffice.com or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.

About Jeci
Jeci is an Information Technology services company that specializes in Free and Open Source technologies (FLOSS). Set near Dijon in Burgundy, Jeci mostly works remotely but also on site in France, Belgium and Switzerland. We provide turnkey ready Alfresco Community Platforms. The platforms use Docker for a quick and reproducible deployment. We also provide services around containers, kubernetes, and cloud native software development. More details on jeci.fr.