Collabora Online 6.4.4 – making presentations more beautiful with shadowed tables

Collabora Online 6.4.4 is adding the handling of shadows for tables in Impress

Besides various performance improvements, Collabora Online 6.4.4 also brings a few new features. You can now add shadows to the tables in Impress, enhancing your presentations and also improving the interoperability with Microsoft PowerPoint documents. Furthermore, Collabora Online now supports the latest ODF 1.3 format and all its improvements. Have a look at the 6.4 release notes for a detailed overview of this important update.

How to add shadows to tables in Impress

When a table is selected, you can access the new feature through the Tables Properties button on the Tables tab – or in the menu Table for the Classic Toolbar. Inside that dialog choose the Shadows tab and mark the Use Shadows checkbox to activate the feature.

The shadow option is available through Table Properties in the Tables tab

 

To customize the appearance of the shadow, you can:

  • specify the direction,
  • choose a colour from the various palettes the colour picker,
  • set the distance from the object,
  • and define the percentage of the transparency of the shadow.

 

 

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 Collabora Office on Twitter .

Powerful spreadsheet features arrive for tablets

 

Pivot Tables, Managing Names and Statistical Tools and more available for tablets in Collabora Office 6.4.3

Version 6.4.3 brings features for working with spreadsheets on Android tablets of iPads. You can now insert or edit Pivot Tables, Define and Manage Names and use and use the powerful Collabora Office Statistical Tools. Writer gains the ability to Insert Bookmarks and Reference Fields. Please be aware, that these new features can currently not be accessed through the UI on phones. However, many UI and UX improvements have been implemented in this version, making the apps both easier to use and fun to work with. Find a description of the new Calc features in our earlier released Collabora Online 6.4.3 announcement.

 

Staged releases on Android devices

Since the upgrade to the new major branch Collabora Office 6.4 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 version 6.4.3 sooner than others.

 

Available on Chromebooks

Together with the update of our mobile apps version 6.4.3 of Collabora Office is now also available for Chrome OS. Users of Chromebooks are entitled to all the above mentioned features. Since Collabora Office for Chrome OS is distributed via the Play Store, it is also available as a staged release.

 

Download Collabora Office 6.4.3

Collabora Office is available through the Play Store and App Store. We also provide the latest .apk for Android! Collabora Office is also available on F-Droid via a third-party repository to add.

 

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 Collabora Office on Twitter .

 

Important new spreadsheet features and many other improvements in Collabora Online 6.4.3

Pivot Tables, Managing Names and Statistical Tools – new in Collabora Online 6.4.3

Version 6.4.3 brings powerful features to Calc online. You can now insert or edit Pivot Tables, and can now Define and Manage Names and use new Statistical Tools in spreadsheets. AutoFilter works more smoothly as well. Writer gains the ability to Insert Bookmarks and Reference Fields and there are many improvements to make Collabora Online better looking, easier to use and to offer more functionality. The full overview is in the release notes page.

Using Pivot Tables in Collabora Online

Pivot Tables are a flexible and powerful analysis tool for mixed data sets. The Pivot Table icon on the Data tab starts the wizard to create a Pivot Table in three steps. Editing the lay out of an existing Pivot Table, can be started with the same button. To create a new Pivot Table, do the following:

    1. Select the source (use the current selection or define one)
    2. Define the layout by dragging the available fields to the desired part of the Pivot Table
    3. Make final adjustments like defining the destination (new tab, or a position on the current one) of the Pivot Table and other options.

 

Select the data source for the Pivot Table
Step 1: Select the data source for the Pivot Table
Defining a Pivot Table layout in Collabora Online
Step 2: Drag and drop the available fields to define the layout of the Pivot Table
Pivot Table wizard in Collabora Online
Step 3: Make final (optinal) adjustments, like e. g. destination of the Pivot Table
Filtering data and adjusting the finest details to get the perfect result, with a rich set of sub-dialogs familiar from the desktop!

 

Defining and managing Range Names in Calc Online

Define Names allows you to specify easy to use names for selected areas. Access this function via the Data tab in Calc (or the Insert tab in later versions). Once one or more ranges are defined, they can be managed through the Manage Names function. While calculation in Online always used these names, the ability to manage them online is very convenient.

Defining range names in Collabora Online
Manage range names in Collabora Online
Mind that via the Options in Define Names, you can also define a Print Range. Print ranges are essential to configure and print useful PDF documents from a spreadsheet focused on the areas of greatest interest. Another great win in this new Collabora Online version!

 

 New look of AutoFilter in Collabora Online

The AutoFilter feature has been redesigned and is now using natively themed dialogs. It generates a rich combo box on the data columns of a range, that allows you select the data to be displayed and as well start the dialog for the even more flexible Standard Filter dialog.

 

Statistical tools for data analysis

Calc offers more than a dozen powerful statistical tools. Those are now available in Collabora Online via tab Data, tab. For statistical analysis you can access:

  • Sampling
  • Descriptive Statistics
  • Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)
  • Correlation
  • Covariance
  • Exponential Smoothing
  • Moving Average
  • Regression
  • Paired t-test
  • F-test
  • Z-test
  • Chi-square Test

A more detailed description about the statistical tools is available in the Collabora Online documentation. The Fourier Analysis can also be found inside the Statistics menu.

 

Improved document jail performance

Then there is an important improvement in performance for some users in Collabora Online 6.4.3. The details are rather technical. Collabora Online isolates each document into a secure jail. This is done by falling back through a series of options to ensure performance and security. The fastest approach (tried first) is bind-mounting, after which Collabora Online tries to use capabilities like cap_fowner to hard-link system files in. Unfortunately, in the 6.4.x series an intersection with systemd namespaces crippled this hard-linking optimization. In 6.4.3 this is now solved by copying files out of the system to a place that can safely and quickly hard-linked so then they can be shared. This is far faster than the ultimate fallback: raw copying of the data. The developers further accelerated the raw copying case by avoiding copying dictionaries too. For some systems this should give a significant performance win for document thumbnailing and load times, we also warn when hitting this slowest code-path too.

 

More new features in Collabora Online 6.4.3

Collabora Online is in permanent development, steadily introducing safe new features into our stable releases and constantly improving interoperability and user experience. Please check-out our release notes to find out about the latest features and improvements. Would you like to test the latest version with all new features? Then simply request a free demo!

 

 

How to access the new features in the classic UI

The new icons are only available in the new NotebookBar UI. However, if you are using the classic UI you will also be able to access the Pivot Table, AutoFilter, Define Name & Manage Names via the Data tab. On mouseover, a dropdown menu will give you access to the features.

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 Collabora Office on Twitter .