Collabora Office 21.06 brings enhanced productivity and smoother migration

The new Collabora Office 21.06 release enhances the productivity of all users and improves interoperability

Cambridge, June 28th, 2021 – Today we are pleased to announce the availability of the new major release of Collabora Office. By enhancing the productivity of all users with design improvements, as well as smoothing document interchange through improved interoperability, better performance and more, this new release makes migration even simpler for organizations.
Collabora Office, for Mac OS, Windows and Linux, is an enterprise version of the worlds most popular open source office productivity suite LibreOffice. This forms the foundation for online collaboration as Collabora Online, and powers apps for iOS, Android and Chrome OS. The whole suite offers businesses and professionals the best features, interoperability, LTS, and custom support in open source, while respecting user privacy and corporate data security. With this release, we unify the version numbers to a more user-friendly scheme based on release year and month.
For news & and improvements in the consecutive updates, check this page.

Pick the interface that is more familiar and effective for you

Collabora Office has a great choice in user interfaces: a tabbed NotebookBar (for users familiar with recent Microsoft Office versions), as well as a traditional menus and toolbars. In addition we provide an optional side bar tool palette that makes best use of available horizontal screen space. With easy access to tools users can quickly find what they need. An additional feature of Collabora Office 21.06 allows you to see a preview of the Graphical User Interface style to help you to choose the one that best serves your needs and habits. Certain new features, such as the new Style Preview widget discussed below, only fit inside specific UI modes.


Helping users understand their use of styles

Styles make it easy to quickly create beautiful consistent office documents of all kinds: presentations/drawings, spreadsheets and text documents. However, some users are confused by styles and prefer to use direct formatting such as ‘bold’ or ‘italic’ which is then hard to adapt to style the document consistently. To overcome this hesitance the new Collabora Office offers users the new features Styles Inspector and toolbar Style Preview.

Style Inspector: a powerful tool to understand your Writer documents


The Style Inspector allows the user to inspect the rich hierarchical detail behind the styles (and direct formatting) applied to a cursor position in a Writer document. That makes it easy to diagnose the cause of unusual formatting in text documents and to clean it up.

This feature was developed in different phases, having been part of a Google Summer of Code (GSoc) 2020 project that had been mentored by Collaborans. For those interested in a fuller account of this phase of the work please see this earlier blog entry or the final report of the scholarship holder. Naturally, you can also modify any style through the Style Inspector.
Click to see it in action

Style Preview: easily select the styles you want

The appealing new Style Preview widget gives you a visual feedback about the currently applied style in the selected area of the Writer document. The selected style inside the widget always follows the cursor position. This makes it much easier to create attractive looking headings and document structure that can be later styles to taste in addition to the existing power-users keyboard shortcuts of <ctrl>-1,2,3 etc. to select heading styles.

This feature was first made available in our flagship product Collabora Online in the browser and has now been brought to the desktop Notebookbar. It is available in the home tab of the “Tabbed” User Interface.

The Style Preview widget is available through the Home tab in the Tabbed User Interface

Improved interoperability across the board

Collabora Office is known for excellent support of all file formats, from legacy binary formats to recent Microsoft Office XML documents. Even so – corner cases pop up where we can improve and to help our users and customers migrate. There have been more improvements here than we can list but we show a few highlights of the various ways in which Collabora Office 21.06 improves interoperability. Improved PPTX filter, special effects on shapes, better spreadsheet formula, margins and much much more.

Improved PPTX import


Collabora Office 21.06 includes many improvements around importing PPTX files. As you see in this example, you can now import images that were cropped into custom shapes and they will be displayed as expected. The new PPTX filters improve the import of several types of cropped images with transformations such mirroring and greyscale conversion.

Office 365: Original custom shaped image in a PowerPoint slide
In earlier versions of LibreOffice the image would lose the custom shape upon import
Collabora Office 21.06: True to the original import of shaped images from PPTX

Glow and Soft Edge effects for shapes


Collabora Office 21.06 introduces further features to manipulate shapes according to your preferences. Once a shape is selected, you can choose the radius of the Glow effect and its Soft Edges within the sidebar using the Effects parameter. Furthermore, you can select the colour and the degree of transparency of the effect. This function can be applied to all shapes across Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw.

Collabora Office 21.06: Apply Glow and Soft Edges to shapes

 

Improved interoperability & printing with gutter margins

A good example of the many improvements to Writer’s interoperability is the addition of an extra space to the side margin, top margin, or inside margins of documents. This gutter margin makes sure that the text of a printed publication is not obscured by the binding. Implementing this feature improved interoperability with Microsoft Word documents that use it. You can find the relevant settings via the Page Style dialog.

Many Excel compatible formulae improvements and extensions

Many functions have been improved both to extend interoperability with Excel, and to add new functionality. Support for sheet-local scoped names has been added to INDIRECT(), and both TEXT() and OFFSET() have been is adapted to various corner cases to behave identically to the competition. TEXTJOIN() and CONCAT() now handle array & matrix arguments row-wise for improved compatibility. In addition functions that use powerful regular expressions now correctly honour case-insensitivity flags.

Accessibility checking on PDF export

A new feature has been added to make documents more accessible. PDF/UA or ISO 14289 is a specification that defines requirements for accessibility in a PDF document. When exporting a document to PDF you can now run a test that is helpful in checking various features against the Universal Accessibility standards requirements. You can also run the Accessibility Check independently from the Tools menu. This feature was sponsored thanks to the Dutch Standardization Forum. Find more details about which checks have currently been implemented in Tomaz Vajngerl’s blog but do keep in mind that not all requirements can be checked automatically.

Improved performance in Calc

Collabora continues to put a lot of effort into enhancing the performance of the software. As an example the streamlining of the Find & Replace functionality in Writer resulted in a 50 percent performance improvement. Another would be the scrolling and opening speed of large XLSX files which has been much improved. In Collabora Office 21.06, we have fundamentally revised the way spell checking is done in Calc with a new spell check that prevents continual re-rendering as strings are processed, while also caching spell-checking information yielding considerable performance improvements. Similarly AutoFilter searching is much improved for large numbers of unique records.

Highlight elements of your mathematical formulae with colour

Collabora Office 21.06 provides access to the complete HTML colour palette for displaying elements in formulae and equations within Math. In addition to the basic colours, which can be selected under attributes, there is an easy-to-use palette of colours available in the pane. This useful function comes from LibreOffice 7.1 and was developed by Dante Doménech.

Improved language handling in Writer

The core model of language annotation in LibreOffice is that languages are explicitly assigned to regions of text. This can easily lead to unexpected results when documents that have been created in one local language (without specifying it further) are opened by another user with a different local language setting. Instead of a powerful but potentially confusing “multi languages” result, Writer now resets the language to the user’s UI locale if no document language had been defined. This more consistent behaviour was previously introduced to Calc and Impress and is now also available in Writer.

More attractive and realistic, interoperable shadow effects


In earlier versions, shadows used to be rendered as solid copies of objects. The new Blur option adds more realistic shadows to them. The feature is available through the Shadows tab in the Area dialog or directly through the corresponding setting in the Sidebar. This feature was initially developed during a GSoC20 project by Ahmad Ganzouri and mentored by the Collaborans Tomaž Vajngerl and Miklos Vajna, who later implemented further refinements to it.

Collabora Office 21.06: Add a realistic blur to shadows

Shadowed tables in Impress

Shadow effects are a great way to add depth and appeal to elements. They are available for many objects, such as shapes, and have recently received feature enhancements such as the blur effect. For tables within presentations, shadows are now also available through the Table Properties dialog. The newly added feature incorporates all these extended presentation features including blur.

Collanora Office 21.06: Add shadows to tables in Impress

Making it easier to find and install extensions


There are many useful extensions created to extend both Collabora Office and LibreOffice and make users more productive for certain tasks. These use the thousands of powerful and extensible UNO scripting methods that we export. However these have been more difficult to find and install. In Collabora Office 21.06, without having to leave your workflow, you can easily find them near where they are used wherever you see the download-extensions icon. Users can easily search and add extensions from a store like interface. This feature was proposed by the LibreOffice design team and was a GSoC 2020 project mentored by Collabora. You can access the feature through the icon (a yellow star with a download arrow) in the Templates dialog, the Icon Style option or from the Gallery located in the sidebar.

Please click on thumbnails to enlagre.

 

21.06: The Collabora Office of the year

It’s obvious that this major version of Collabora Office not only introduces lots of benefits for users and enterprises, but also changes our versioning scheme. In the past, the numbering was based around the LibreOffice numbers. The new system now, makes it easier for users to recall the pedigree of their version, when it was originally released and to be more aware of our annual version refreshes. The first two digits of the scheme refer to the year, the last two to the month of the initial release. Smaller subsequent updates will be denoted with an appended digit, and a further nano release.

Collabora Office 21.06 splash screen

About Collabora Office

Collabora Office is the LibreOffice Technology-based suite for professional, mobile, and online use. Collabora Office 21.06 provides businesses and professionals with the best features, interoperability, LTS and L3 support.
Collabora is privileged to work with so many great contributors to the LibreOffice project and appreciates all the amazing work done by so many that is included into Collabora Office 21.06. This, our annual release, contains much work that was contributed to LibreOffice 7.0 and then LibreOffice 7.1, for a deep dive on detail and credits please do peruse these.

It’s easy to migrate to Collabora Office 21.06

You can try Collabora Office 21.06 yourself! Just head to the Collabora Office page and request your demo today!

Try the Demo

Thanks to the community!

Collabora has invested significantly in bringing many new features and functionality to this latest release, and accounts for a significant volume of contributions. However, we want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues who helped to contribute to this and the upstream LibreOffice Technology. Find the details in either the release notes above or the LibreOffice community credits. We cannot thank everyone involved enough for their passionate work! LibreOffice is a friendly community offering many ways to get involved. Alternately, if you are interested in joining the Collabora Online community, you will find several easy ways to started inside our community hub – we look forward to
welcoming you.

Collabora Online Community Roundup #11

On 1 October 2020, 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 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 few months. -Have been wondering what happened to the “weekly” roundups? Well, your friendly community mentor was having a time off for health reasons due to the pandemic, but now he is all good and back online. ;)-

Month in Numbers

On the Collabora Online code repository in the last month, 47 authors have pushed 266 commits to master and 907 commits to all branches. On master, 258 files have changed and there have been 8,685 additions and 2,186 deletions.

Screenshot of GitHub Pulse for Collabora Online
Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from May 23, 2021 to June 23, 2021

New Contributors

Congratulations to Jerzy Drozdz, Vivekkumar Javiya, Gökhan Karabulut for their first pull requests on our GitHub repository!

  • Thanks to Jerzy Drozdz for adding the missing class A IP addresses regex to the loolwsd config file, thus helping COOL to be compatible with very large networks.
  • Thanks to Vivekkumar Javiya for adjusting the Notebookbar font size, adding support for signaling the fullscreen status in the menu, and adding comments to the Map.js to improve the inline documentation of the code-base.
  • Thanks to Gökhan Karabulut for helping COOL become easier-to-debug and more clutter-free by improving the state dumping and removing some unused fields on the C++ side of the code-base.

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 #30

COOL Weekly Meeting #30 has taken place on Thursday, February 24, 2021 at 10:00:00 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:

  • During the quick update part by Muhammet Kara, it’s been reported that we have 7 easy hacks at the moment, and planning to increase the number of them. He has also mentioned that COOL is now listed on the First Contributions platform.
  • Michael Meeks brought up the topic of Interactive Performance, and mentioned updates on the ongoing work by various team members, such as image scaling profiling, improving table pieces, fixing Calc’s interactivity & drag and drop selection, and benchmarking and performance profiling during collaborative editing by multiple users.
  • Szymon Kłos shared a status update on his recent work on native sidebars, which would improve the performance and user experience while working with the sidebars.
  • Michael Meeks mentioned that all of the patches for the async saving work are now merged, and the bug fixing step is the next.
  • Muhammet Kara mentioned the nice work by Chetanya Kandhari on the Mattermost integration of Collabora Online.
  • Gabriel Masei shared an update on the stability profiling/improvement efforts going on, followed by a discussion with Andras Timar on the docker image scripts.
  • Quick updates on various ongoing efforts were shared by Michael Meeks.
  • Various topics around design bits were discussed, signalling a lot of visual/aestetic improvements especially on Calc.
  • Pedro Silva pointed out that the Cypress tests need to be made more stable, and acknowledged the recent nice work by Rashesh Padia on that front.
  • Andras Timar shared that CODE 6.4.10 release is planned for the next week.
  • Muhammet Kara reminded everyone that the CfP deadline for LibOCon 2021 is on June 30th, so ~1 week left to submit papers.

Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the meeting, and join us on Thursday, July 01, 2021, at 10:00 am (UTC) to stay in touch with the rest of the community. You may also make your own suggestions for the next meeting by following the link shared in the COOL Telegram group before the next meeting. We’re looking forward to hearing from you live. 😉

Move to Libera.Chat

We set up a #cool-dev channel from the first day of Libera.Chat to help people migrate, and recently made the decision to drop our Freenode channel. Thankfully, the LibreOffice channels are also moving, so we will stay aligned with the wider project. So if you were wondering where everyone went, here is your answer. 😉

Collabora Online (COOL)

  • Thanks to Marco Cecchetti for adding cypress tests for the fullscreen presentation, thus helping us ensure the stability and quality of COOL while doing presentations.
  • Thanks to Gabriel Masei for adding support for lost kits cleanup, thus helping COOL become more friendly in terms of system resource usage as well as making sure the button for the hyperlink dialog is enabled and disabled properly while dynamically changing the UI mode to classic.
  • Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for improving the CODE docker image creation for arm64.
  • Thanks to Ayhan Yalçınsoy for helping to ensure COOL code-base’s compliance with the modern JS coding standards by updating the eslint version to 7.0.0 as well as making sure it builds without error on certain platforms.
  • Thanks to Ezinne Nnamani for making sure the paste shortcut CTRL+V works properly on the comment dialog, as well as for ensuring that the Impress slide previews in vertical orientation are fitting the screen nicely on mobile devices.
  • Thanks to Mike Kaganski for adding support for integrations that use certain URL parameters, and improving pixmap handling for watermarks thus possibly helping COOL perform better on related scenarios.
  • Thanks to Muhammet Kara for enabling CodeQL checks for C++ on our code repo, thus helping to maintain the code quality while adding new features and fixing issues, along with various improvements around the contributor friendliness of our project.

    CodeQL
    CodeQL is the analysis engine used by developers to automate security checks, and by security researchers to perform variant analysis.
  • Thanks to Aron Budea for various fixes and improvements such as making sure the Page Up and Page Down keys work properly in the slide sorter on Impress, and updating Cypress from 6.2.1 to 6.8.0 thus helping COOL’s testing facilities stay up to date.
  • Thanks to Gleb Popov for a lot of fixes and improvements around the FreeBSD support of COOL such as fixing tests and adding new CI configurations to ensure continuous stability of COOL on the aforementioned systems.
  • Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for a lot of fixes and improvements around cypress (testing framework), and the testing facilities thus helping COOL maintain quality over time.
  • Thanks to Henry Castro for various fixes and improvements such as adding configuration options for macro enabling macros and also setting security level for macros, thus helping COOL become easier to customize for different work settings.
  • Thanks to Mert Tümer for a series of fixes and improvements especially around improving experience on mobile views.
  • Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for fixing various issues around comment handling such as fixing an error on annotation insertion in Impress, and also for updating the instructions to set up COOL in Kubernetes (K8s), along with many other fixes and improvements.

    Kubernetes logo
    Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
  • Thanks to Miklos Vajna for various fixes and improvements especially towards general stability of the code-base, and also for helping us move our IRC notifications to #cool-dev’s new home on Libera.Chat.
  • Thanks to Andras Timar for fixing tooltip text for some notebookbar items, thus improving the user experience of COOL, along with various other improvements and maintenance especially around localization, containerization and packaging.
  • Thanks to Rashesh Padia for many fixes and improvements especially around the Cypress UI tests, thus helping us maintain high quality of COOL’s user experience.
  • Thanks to Michael Meeks for a lot of improvements particularly focused on performance testing and asynchronous behavior, thus possibly making user experience smoother for the users of COOL.
  • Thanks to Gökay Şatır for his work on the new CanvasTileLayer towards offering a much smoother and crisper viewing experience for the users at different zoom levels.
  • Thanks to Dennis Francis for a ton of fixes, which can’t fit into a single sentence of the summary, from getting rid of the flickering during zoom animations to ensuring that the autofill behavior works properly without unwanted view jumps, thus improving the overall user experience of COOL in various ways.
  • Thanks to Pedro Silva for various fixes and improvements especially around the user interface of COOL to make it have a better and more consistent look and feel, as well as improving the Cypress tests to ensure the continuous quality of COOL.
  • Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for a lot of fixes and improvements towards modernizing the code-base.
  • Thanks to Andreas Kainz for his work towards making COOL look better on all platforms with a shiny and consistent look & feel, in cooperation with other contributors and team members such as our UI expert Pedro Silva.
  • Thanks to Szymon Kłos for various improvements and fixes especially around the notebookbar, sidebar, cypress and various dialogs, thus helping COOL become richer in feature and have an even better user experience. Check out his blog post for an update on his recent work on native sidebars!

    Native sidebars on Collabora Online in action
  • Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for various fixes and improvements towards increasing general stability of COOL and maintainability of the code-base along with tests to make our code-base future-proof, working on the async upload feature which will provide a much smoother experience for the users especially in collaborative environments, and also for reviewing pull requests of other contributors, and for mentoring them through tough issues.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

  • Thanks to Michael Weghorn for moving the file reading logic of the Android app to a separate thread thus possibly helping it to become more responsive while opening office documents.
  • Thanks to Mert Tümer for various fixes and improvements on the Android app such as making it possible to open PDF files.
  • Thanks to Miklos Vajna for making sure the Android app knows the user’s name or nickname properly and improving localization of the app by marking certain UI strings for localization, along with various other fixes and improvements.
  • Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for various fixes and improvements on the iOS app such as allowing it to open PDF files, and ensuring it is built without errors.

Collabora Online Integrations

  • Thanks to Dave Conroy for fixing OOXML template extension, thus making sure OOXML spreadsheets can be successfully created on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.
  • Thanks to Joas Schilling for helping with the housekeeping of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by updating node and npm versions.
  • Thanks to Roeland Jago Douma for reviewing and merging the pull requests from other contributors on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.
  • Thanks to Valdnet for various fixes and improvements around the localization of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.
  • Thanks to John Molakvoæ for various under-the-hood improvements on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration.
  • Thanks to Szymon Kłos for various improvements and fixes on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, such as making sure the configuration caching doesn’t cause users to be stuck in an erroneous state on certain cases after a fresh boot of COOL.
  • Thanks to Julius Härtl for countless fixes and improvements on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration as well as reviewing and merging pull requests of others.
  • Thanks to Semih Serhat Karakaya for fixing PHPStan issues on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration, thus helping to improve its CI facilities.
  • Thanks to Phil Davis for helping to keep Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration up-to-date, as well as reviewing and merging pull requests of others.
  • Thanks to Piotr Mrówczyński for various fixes and improvements on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration such as ensuring that secure view is enabled by default for all documents when it is enabled.
  • Thanks to Jürgen Weigert for helping with the housekeeping of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration by updating packages and the changelog as well as reviewing and merging the pull requests of other contributors.
  • Thanks to Dipak Acharya for updating CI facilities of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration, thus helping to maintain its code quality.
  • Thanks to theheyon for various under-the-hood fixes and improvements on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration.
  • Thanks to Jan Ackermann for a lot of fixes and improvements on Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration, as well as reviewing and merging pull requests of other contributors.
  • Thanks to Jérémie Lesage of Jeci for countless fixes and improvements on Collabora Online’s Alfresco integration, from updating the README file to make it more developer-friendly, to adding CI facilities to ensure its continued quality.
  • Thanks a lot to Chetanya Kandhari of Brightscout for revamping Collabora Online’s Mattermost plugin completely, making it more user-friendly and modern-looking, as well as bringing it in alignment with Mattermost’s plugin guidelines.

    Collabora Online’s Mattermost integration in action

Honorable Mentions

  • 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 Eloy Crespo for his efforts to help the project well-funded as always.
  • 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 Pedro Silva for improving various points around the COOL Community Page and forum, and also for helping other contributors by providing instructions on their pull requests as well as reviewing them.
  • Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
  • Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for various tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
  • 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.
  • 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 Gabriel Masei for making sure that mpWindowImpl is checked before referencing, thus improving stability of LibreOffice by preventing possible crashes.
  • Thanks to Miklos Vajna for many improvements and fixes along with adding new cool features to LibreOffice. Here are a few of them:
    • After the bibliography improvements in LibreOffice Writer, funded by TUBITAK ULAKBIM, Writer now has three improvements in this area: more information about the bibliography entries in the form of a mouse tooltip and clickable URLs in the table, the ability to refer to a specific page of a (potentially long) source. Check out his blog posts[0][1] for details!
      Tooltip for bibliography entry fields
      Clickable URLs in the bibliography table

      Refer to a specic page of a bibliography source, user interface
    • Improvements to gutter margin in Writer as part of his hack-week activity at Collabora.
    • Improved borders of merged table cells in Writer. Also thanks to Docmosis for making this improvement possible by funding the work on it.
    • Writer line heights: removing a 16bit limit. Also thanks to Vector for making this improvement possible by funding the work on it.
  • Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for continuing his work towards developing a built-in Xray-like UNO object inspector. This effort has been funded by The Document Foundation, so also thanks a lot to the TDF Board of Directors, and the TDF donors who made the work on this tool possible! Check out his blog posts for all the details:
  • Thanks to Mike Kaganski for implementing support for multi-column layout in LibreOffice’s text boxes. Also thanks a lot to SUSE, our valued partner, for making this improvement possible by funding the work on it. Check out the blog post for all the details!

    Multiple columns in LibreOffice text boxes
  • Thanks to Gülşah Köse for various fixes and improvements especially towards improving interoperability of LibreOffice with foreign document formats, thus improving interoperability with other office suites.
  • Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.
  • Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for a lot of fixes and improvements especially towards better support on macOS and iOS.
  • Thanks to Gopi Krishna Menon for ensuring[0][1][2] crash reports are more detailed, thus making it easier to fix critical issues on LibreOffice.
  • Thanks to Sarper Akdemir for various fixes and improvements on OOXML file formats, thus helping LibreOffice to improve in terms of interoperability.

Import CSV from any device, any way you like, into Collabora Online 6.4.9

 

With the release of Collabora Online 6.4.9, it is now possible to import CSV files or structured text any way you like on any of your devices. We included a new dialog that makes the import process just as convenient as you are used to it on full-screen interface of your browser. This update does also include several performance and UX improvements.

Import CSV through browsers on mobile devices

Collabora Online allows you to access documents trough browsers of any kind of device. No matter if you are using it on a large monitor, laptop, tablet or smartphone – the flexible interface will provide you with a feature rich and consistent user experience. Collabora Online 6.4.9 introduces a new dialog allowing to import CSV files through mobile devices.

The dialog will show up whenever you access a CSV file or any other type of structured text through the browser of your mobile device. Inside the dialog you can adjust various settings for the import process:

  • Define character set
  • Choose language
  • Define import starting row
  • Specify separator options
  • Edit string delimiter
  • See a preview of the imported CSV

 

More features and improvements

There is more in to discover in this new version. Elements you might not notice at first glance, but do add substantial value to your workflow.

    • Performance improvements in Calc
    • Performance improvements in Writer (table editing)
    • User interface fixes in the NotebookBar
    • Fixed rendering of page background gradients

Find furtherdetails to this and earlier releases in the Collabora Online 6.4. release notes. Access your free demo today to test all the new 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 .

How to: easily deploy Collabora Online on your Kubernetes setup

All you need to deploy Collabora Online on your Kubernetes setup, is applying these configuration settings on your installation of Collabora Online.

Install Collabora Online on Kubernetes in 3 easy steps

With the increasing use of the Kubernetes, we are happy to provide an easy way to deploy our online on your Kubernetes setup.
Thanks to Collabora developer lpranam, Collabora Online can be setup with Kubernetes and also a key feature such as collaborative editing will work correctly. Therefore it is vital to ensure that all users editing the same document end up being served by the same pod. Using the WOPI protocol, the http/https URL includes a unique identifier (WOPISrc) for use with that document. Thus load balancing can be done by using WOPISrc – ensuring that all URLs that contain the same WOPISrc are sent to the same pod. We use a reverse proxy to achieve this load balancing mechanism. HAProxy provides the easiest way to achieve all are requirements for this setup.

Pre-installation checklist

  1. running Kubernetes cluster
  2. The helm command-line tool
  3. The kubectl command-line tool

Configuration files can be found at github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/tree/master/kubernetes/helm/collabora-online

Installation steps

  1. Install HAProxy ingress controller
    kubectl apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/haproxytech/kubernetes-ingress/master/deploy/haproxy-ingress.yaml
  2. Prepare the namespace in the Kubernetes cluster with this command
    kubectl create namespace collabora
  3. Install collabora online helm chart
    helm install collabora-online ./kubernetes/helm/collabora-online/

Accessing online service

The following steps may vary a little according to your cloud providers. Here we demonstrate how to access the online with a minikube setup on a local machine.

HAproxy is installed as a NodePort service so to access any service through HAProxy we can use the node’s ip.

  1. To get your node ip with minikube minikube ip

example output

192.168.0.106

2. Each container port is mapped to a NodePort port via the Service object. To find those ports

kubectl get svc --namespace=haproxy-controller

example output

In this instance, the following ports were mapped:

  • Container port 80 to NodePort 30536
  • Container port 443 to NodePort 31821
  • Container port 1024 to NodePort 30480

3. Now in this case to make our hostname available we have to add the following line into /etc/hosts:

192.168.0.106 loolwsd.public.example.com

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