Thank you for a great 2023!

Thank You for Everything We Achieved Together in 2023 🤝

At the end of the year, we like to look back at what we have achieved as a team alongside our worldwide network of partners and the community. 2023 was a particularly significant year for us as we celebrated ten years of Collabora Productivity, adding another productive decade to our mission of bringing document editing and trillions of existing documents into the free world!

 

 

In March we held another successful COOL Days conference, this time in Cambridge, which brought together our team, partners and the community. We are looking forward to another great event in April 2024 – join us!

As well as our own events, our team also attended over ten locations to present talks, meet partners and share Collabora Online with the wider community. You can keep up to date with our adventures on our events page.

2023 saw many organisations and users throwing off their proprietary shackles, and embracing the freedom open-source solutions bring. In particular, we saw many educational institutions reconsidering their relationship with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace amid privacy concerns, great strides being taken by local and national governments such as the openDesk project in Germany, and increasing numbers of private companies taking back control of their document storage and editing needs.

Collabora Online, Collabora Office and our mobile apps have all seen performance improvements and increased functionality. In July, we released the new major release of our flagship product Collabora Online 23.05, which included increased interoperability, performance boosts and a whole range of new features and accessibility improvements. Thank you for your support! Let’s take a deeper dive into what we have achieved together this year. 💜

 

Collabora Online 22.05 → 23.05

Our flagship product, Collabora Online saw marked improvements in 2023, introducing many exciting new features and a big focus on accessibility, working to bring the best digital experience we can to all our users, regardless of their abilities or challenges.

  • February 2023: Zotero plug in, PDF and EPUB export options, insert page number dialog, Duden Corrector plugin, easy hyperlink pop up editor
  • March 2023: linking API, improved conditional formatting from XLSX files.
  • April 2023: interoperability improvements.
  • July 2023: major release 23.05 introducing dark mode, expanded keyboard shortcuts, initial screen reading support, document themes, multi-page floating tables and accessibility improvements.
  • August 2023: further updates to keyboard shortcuts and more performance improvements.
  • September 2023: new font previews and barcode/QR code functionality.
  • October & November 2023: a focus on polishing and bug fixing with over 70 improvements.
  • December 2023: STYLEREF, floating tables properties, re-designed PostMessage for integrators and developers.

See the full release notes for Collabora Online 23.05 and COOL 22.05.

 

CODE: Developing a Rock-Solid Enterprise Version 💪

The latest major release of the Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) 23.05 was released in June. CODE always appears in advance of the corresponding version of Collabora Online – the Development Edition contains all new features which are extensively tested before becoming available in the Enterprise version (COOL). An overview of CODE releases for 2023 can be found in the release notes but will mostly mirror those of Collabora Online. You can find the conversations about CODE on social media, by searching for the hashtag #cool_dev on Mastodon or Twitter.

 

Powerful New Features for Collabora Office on the Desktop 🖥️

August 2023 saw the latest major release of Collabora Office, our long term supported desktop Office Suite for Windows, macOS, and Linux. This release brought a number of powerful productivity features focusing on accessibility and improving user experience. The new features contain code that was contributed to LibreOffice 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6. Collabora Office for Windows is available through the Microsoft Store. The latest version for macOS can be bought from the App Store. We also appreciate those who help us test the latest features inside our unstable snapshots.

  • August 2023: major release of Collabora Office 23.05 including dark mode, interoperability features, document themes, 64-bit zip support, advanced editing features for tables and forms and so much more!
  • September 2023: MS Office interoperability improvements including further support of document themes, floating tables and pivot tables.
  • December 2023: Collabora Office 23.05.6 – STYLEREF, floating tables properties and advanced header and footer functionality.

Many new Features for Collabora Office for Android, iOS & Chrome OS📱

Our major release for mobile and tablet devices in September 2023 brought more of the functionality from Collabora Online into the pockets of our users, as well as improving the current user experience and making navigating on smaller screens easier. Now you can use dark mode, improved form controls in Writer, Sparklines, consistent dialogs and a better UX for users on smaller screened devices.

 

Events 🗓️

COOL Days 2023 took place in Cambridge, with more than 50 participants joining from our team, partners and the community. We presented 45 lightning talks showcasing our talented developers’ work across the year, held workshops and discussions with our partners about the importance of data protection in Europe, shared our development roadmap, and further discussed how to mutually support our sales and marketing efforts as part of our partnership. The community dived into a LibreOffice Hackfest and of course we had a great time socialising and team building around historic Cambridge.

 

 

 

As well as our own annual conference, our team attended events across Europe presenting talks, meeting partners and sharing Collabora Online, as well as presenting a keynote at the LibreOffice Conference for Latin America in Mexico.

2023 Events

 

Date Event Location Links
17th – 18th January 2023 Univention Summit Bremen, Germany Blog
4th – 5th February 2023 FOSDEM Brussels, Belgium Blog & Talks
6th – 8th March 2023 CS3 Barcelona, Spain Talk Recording
28th – 29th March 2023 COOL Days Cambridge, UK Blog, Live Stream
16th – 17th September 2023 Nextcloud Conference Berlin, Germany Blog & Talks
20th – 23rd September 2023 LibreOffice Conference Bucharest, Romania Blog & Talks
28th – 29th September 2023 SeaDays Mainz, Germany Talk
7th – 9th November 2023 Smart Country Convention Berlin, Germany openDesk Blog
9th – 10th November 2023 LibreOffice Congreso Latin America Mexico City, Mexico Keynote
6th – 7th December 2023 Open Source Experience Paris, France Talk Slides

 

LibreOffice Community & Contributions to 7.5 and 7.6

Collabora Productivity is part of the ecosystem developing and advancing LibreOffice technology. We are the largest contributor to the LibreOffice codebase, with our developers contributing many commits to the LibreOffice core.

LibreOffice 7.5 and LibreOffice 7.6 saw many improvements from the team at Collabora – here is just a snapshot of some of the commits this year.

  • Content controls – added plain text type, combo box, PDF export, titles and tags. (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
  • Impress now supports cropped video for media shapes. blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
  • Citation handling: added plumbing in Writer to build Zotero-like functionality. blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
  • Keyboard navigation through forms (Justin Luth, Collabora)
  • Replacing strings with numbers in Calc tdf#126109 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
  • Find and replace in very large Calc sheets tdf#150749 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
  • Added page number wizard in Insert menu for easy one-step insertion of the page number in the header/footer tdf#86630 (Paris Oplopoios / Justin Luth, Collabora)
  • Initial machine translation is available, backend by DeepL translate (Mert Tumer, Collabora) core commit e20d2tdf#34058
  • Added pivot table compact layout. core commit 2f8d1 (Dennis Francis, Collabora)
  • Display soft breaks as line breaks at fontwork. tdf#148000 (Attila Szűcs, Collabora)
  • Added support to open multi image tiff files tdf#155444 (Rashesh Padia, Collabora)
  • Auto fitting text scaling algorithm has been changed so it works similar to MS Office. (Tomaž Vajngerl, Collabora)

Of course, we also had many of our developers share their work in the LibreOffice Technology devroom at FOSDEM this year. You can find links to their talks and slides in our blog.

 

Partners

This year we have welcomed 20 new partners from across Europe, Australia and South America including Oodrive, Salesframe, Aridhia and unodata. We are very happy to have a growing partner network allowing more and more users to take control of their data.

Team

This year we have seen our team grow, adding another 17 people to our core team at Collabora Productivity within our Sales, Marketing and Technical teams, with 50% of these coming from the Collabora Online Community. We love to hire smart people who have contributed to the Open Source community. This allows us to provide a richer experience for our partners and customers.

Collabora Online Community Contributions

The Collabora Online Community kept growing and helped to improve the software through their commits, feedback, and translations. You can see from the stats above that our Community is doing great things! You too, can help to make Collabora Online better. Join the discussions in our forum, join our community calls every Thursday at 12pm CET, translate strings on Weblate, file bug reports or feature requests on GitHub and spread the word on Collabora Online!

 

The Collabora Online SDK ⚙️

The Collabora Online SDK describes the main methods that allow you to interact with different Collabora Online components. Find installation guides, frequently asked questions, Post Message API and documentation on exiting integrations and on how to create new ones. This year we continued to add to our information to enable better integrations and clearer guidance.

A small sample of some 2023 updates:

 

Thanks to all who helped out!

It has been an exciting year here at Collabora Productivity, and we are so grateful to everyone who has been involved in 2023, and indeed for the past ten years – customers, partners, staff, and the community. We couldn’t have achieved any of these things without everyone working together so well. We have big plans for 2024 and are anticipating an even more exciting year ahead. We look forward to sharing it with you!

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, if you’d like to partner with us, or to download Collabora Online. Thank you for the great support this year. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thank You!

 

News by Collabora Directly into your Inbox 📨

Keep up to date with our public newsletter. If you would like to receive regular updates with all the news and updates about Collabora Online, Collabora Office and future events, please sign up to our newsletter.

Tip: keep an eye on our new releases for more new features.

Collabora Productivity Turns Ten

Can you believe it, September 2023 marks the ten year anniversary since Collabora Productivity was incorporated?! It has been a brilliant decade, full of hard work, persistence, collaboration, growth, success and of course, fun!

We are so grateful to everyone who has supported, contributed and worked with us to make Collabora Online and Office the success it is today. Here are some of the team who have worked with Collabora Productivity along our journey so far. They come from an impressive range of countries, languages, tribes and tongues, we really love to work with the best people wherever they are based.

We loved to celebrate our 10 year anniversary with the LibreOffice community
Celebrations at the LibreOffice Conference 2023 in Bucharest, Romania

 

Thank you to all the coding engineers

It has been amazing over the years to work with 75 talented engineers working on developing the code-base, each one has made a significant improvement somewhere, from interns spending their summer with us, to developers who spent ten years making a huge impact – in alphabetical order:

Abigail Lowrie, Aditya Dewan, András Timár, Andrej Shadura, Andrew Lee (李健秋), Andrzej Hunt, Armin Le Grand, Áron Budea, Ashod Nakashian, Attila Szűcs, Caolán McNamara, Chris Sherlock, Christopher Gladman, Corentin Noël, Daniel Stone, Darshan Upadhyay, Dennis Francis, Emmanuel Gil Peyrot, Ezinne Nnamani, Faruk Uzun, Florin Ciornei, Gökay Şatır, Gopi Krishna Menon, George Wood, Grzegorz Araminowicz, Gülşah Köse, Henry Castro, Hubert Figuière, Iván Sánchez Ortega, Ivan Stefanenko, Jack Leigh, Jan Holešovsky, Jaume Pujantell Traserra, Justin Luth, Kohei Yoshida, László Németh, Lenny Horstink, Louis-Francis Ratté-Boulianne, Luboš Luňák, Lubosz Sarnecki, Luigi Iucci, Marco Cecchetti, Marc Rodrigues, Markus Mohrhard, Matúš Kukan, Mert Tümer, Mihai Varga, Mike Kaganski, Miklós Vajna, Muhammet Kara, Muthu Subramanian, Nick Wingate, Noel Grandin, Oli Baker, Olivier Hallot, Özcan Esen, Paris Oplopoios, Patrick Luby, Pedro Pinto Silva, Pranam Lashkari, Pranav Kant, Rashesh Padia, Sarper Akdemir, Shehr Bano, Skyler Grey, Szymon Kłos, Tamás Bunth, Tamás Zolnai, Thais Vieira, Tim-Philipp Müller, Tomaž Vajngerl, Tor Lillqvist, Ursache Vladimir, Will Thompson, Yunusemre Şentürk

Thank you to all the supporting team

Of course, it’s not just engineering – no company can run as smoothly as Collabora Productivity without a great team around them, its been great to have 41 people across many roles in Management, PoPs, HR, Finance, Marketing, Sysadmin…

Amélie Hanna, Anna Nazaryan, Asja Čandić, Ben Toynton, Cor Nouws, Deirdre Daly, Dorée Carrier, Elisa de Castro Guerra, Eloy Crespo, Ema Infate, Foad Vafaei, Hannah Greetham, Heidi Merrifield, Guy Lunardi, Iris Lee, Jassie Badion, Javier Llamas Mondragon, Jona Aziza, Julie Wilder, Lily Logua, Mark Filion, Mazin Alhaddad, Michael Meeks, Mike Dworski, Mitch Tester, Naomi Obbard, Niall McCarthy, Niamh Merrit, Philippe Kalaf, Richard Brock, Robert McQueen, Sam Tuke, Simon Lofthouse, Simon Napper, Stelios Milidonis, Swapnil Bhartiya, Tim Eyles, Timur Gadžo, Tina Lowe, Tracie Fabb, William Gathoye

Some of our team building events over the last 10 years included Sky Diving, High Ropes, Paddle Boarding, Punting…

Partners

Of course, we wouldn’t be where we are today without our partners. We currently have over 230 partners in 60 countries who work alongside us and integrate Collabora Online into their products. We’d like to thank them for their continued support and trust that has allowed us to grow to grow our businesses together.

We love to work with partners all over the globe

Customers

And to our customers, with some four million paying users, who have entrusted Collabora Productivity to provide their secure online office suite – it’s a privilege to be part of your business!

Community

We love to work alongside so many talented people in the community, with over one thousand four hundred (1400) individual developers committing alongside us to the underlying LibreOffice Technology code we build on over the last ten years, along with a huge number of translators and documentation, UX experts and more all across the world. Please do checkout their credits. We’re particularly grateful to those helping us out with Collabora Online, but for reasons of brevity omit this list of names – checkout the links.

Photos from many of the community events we’ve taken part in over the decade

What have we achieved?

Throughout the decade, Collabora Productivity has focused on supporting our users and giving back to the wider LibreOffice community. We have brought LibreOffice technology to the browser and mobile in an easy to consume way for everyone.

We have released over 31 major releases across LibreOffice-from-Collabora, Collabora Online, Collabora Office, Collabora Office for Mobile and Collabora Online Development Edition.

We have pushed 57,000 commits to LibreOffice and 21,000 to Collabora Online.

We’ve hosted 7 Team and Partner events; Bern in 2014, Brno in 2016, Tirana in 2018, Almeria in 2019. COOL Days, for our partners and community was born during the pandemic. The first was hosted online in 2021, and two in the subsequent years were held in person in Berlin and Cambridge.

Of course, no software is without support tickets, enabling us to assist our customers and partners to get setup, migrated and working smoothly with Collabora products. Over the last 10 years we have closed 3596 tickets – that’s an average of around ten per day, with 19 currently open.

While our primary focus is supporting our product customers, part of Collabora Productivity is our bespoke consultancy work. We have worked with a large number of companies to build better features, provide better interoperability and solve their specific problems, all the while contributing the work back into the wider community. You can read about some of our projects.

Some Special Thank Yous

Some special thank-yous are necessary for the many people behind the scenes who worked hard behind the scenes to make the original spin-out from SUSE a succes – thanks to: Brad Haque, Gerald Pfeifer, Marie Louise van Deutekom, Melanie Reichel, Michal Svec, Nils Brauckmann, Ralf Flaxa and Vojtech Pavlik

Then thanks to our first significant customers, partners and supporters:

It took a special person ten years ago to have faith in this small, new spin-out and to support our work while we went through our teething period as a new company. Many of these people also helped us with support, advice, practical experience in negotiation, and ultimately of course funding. Without them we would not be here today – you are much appreciated:

Daniel Aquilino, Kyle Beam, John Blanton, Jean-Pierre Bordes, William Bridwell, Kent Davison, Holger Dyroff, Fernand, Adam Fyne, Tsahi Glik, David Gümbel, Chris Hall, John Hunter, Frank Karlitschek, Jagan Lokanatha, Robert McCullough, Meir Morganstern, Jos Poortvliet, Anil Raut, Jim Routh, Darren Ruotolo, Robert Schulman, Kismat Singh, Niels Spanjers, Adam Paclt, Antonin Prukl

And finally, a huge set of partners, customers and key users who have contributed so much love, feedback, financial and moral support:

Thank you to all those who have helped to fuel the growth and success of Collabora Productivit from a business perspective over this decade – the full list of names would need to be far longer here, but here are the people that came immediately to mind; thank you !

Maria Alandes Pradillo, Birgit Becker, Ralf Becker, Thorsten Behrens, Maurizio Berti, Oliver Biewald, Jean-Romain Bouquet, Ulrich Brandner, Anthony Callahan, John Carberry, Antonio Chaac Velazquez Rincon, Nicolas Christener, Jan Christoph Dageförde, Denny Dahl, Holger Dyroff, Denny Ehrenberg, Stephan Feldhoff, Eric Ficheux, Vincent Francois, Peter Ganten, Jonas Garstick, Tobias Gerlinger, Peter Gietz, David Gillard, Mark Götting, Nico Gulden, Julius Härtl, Philippe Hemmel, Darren Henderson, Jerome Herledan, Thomas Hildmann, Thomas Hilstad, Timo Hirvonen, Teo Hirvonen, Lars Hoeger, Ali Işıngör, Mihajlo Joksimovic, Niall Keaveney, Nico Kossuch, Devadas Kovilakath, Ryan Kruse, Steve Kucia, Gerald Langisch, Marina Latini, Michiel Leenaars, Jérémie Lesage, Lucie Lesage, Fabian Liedtke, Javier Llamas Mondragón, Giuseppe Lo Presti, Leif Lohdahl, Patrick Maier, Marcel Meyer, Andrea Mörike, Julie Murphy, Robert Nijhof, Robert Nouwens, Jez Nuzum, Jos van den Oever, Olivier Paroz, Jean-François Pellier, Benoit Penicaut, Régis Perdreau, Andreas Rhode, Dave Richards, Bernd Rodler, Ulises Rodriguez, Björn Schieble, Paolo Storti, Mathias Supp, Jorg Thalmann, Sebastiaan Veld, Nicolas Vérité, Arnaud Versini, Christophe Villeneuve, Sean Wilson, Markus Windecker, Andrea Wörrlein, Michael Wuttke


If you read those lists and think – “wow, that’s a lot of people” – you can share our joy at each of the relationships, insights and contributions that we’ve brought into the company from them. There has been a staggering amount of work done.

Thanks too to everyone who has written about us in the media, liked our posts on social media, met us at a conference or event or just told their friends about Collabora. All of this has allowed us to keep doing what we love most – Making Open Source Rock! We’re excited about where we’re at, and are looking forward to another decade of fun!

Join the journey

Become a Partner

Contribute to the Code

Try the Online Demo

 

Collabora Online at the Nextcloud Conference 2023

On 16th and 17th September 2023, some of the team from Collabora Online had the pleasure of joining our partners Nextcloud at the Nextcloud Conference 2023 held at MotionLab, Berlin. It was a privilege to meet so many of their team, new and old, as well as wider members of the open source community.

The conference kicked off with the key note introducing Nextcloud Hub 6 which focuses on creating a healthy meeting culture and implementing a local AI, Nextcloud Assistant.

Fabrice Mous also presented the very latest Hub 6 Office features including features from our Collabora Online 23.05 release such as typography settings, shortcut overlays and change tracking for numbered lists and our 23.05.4 release which includes font previews. The new release also sees 2x faster performance in loading comments and rendering documents.

Check out the Nextcloud Hub 6 key note – it’s definitely worth a watch to see all the exciting advancements that are available now!

Over the weekend, key note speakers Max Schrems, Simon Phipps and Katrin Fritsch shared about various European data privacy policies, The Fourth Sector and why digital sustainability is important. There were also panel sessions, lightning talks from the community and practical workshops.

French partner, Arawa, presented 2 lightning talks: “Usability testing” by Clementine Hemel and “One year of contribution to Nextcloud” by Jérôme Herbinet.

Live stream day one:

Live stream day two:

Collabora Online’s contributions

On Saturday, Michael Meeks gave a workshop in the ‘big blue bus’ about how to contribute to Collabora Online.

Michael’s workshop on Saturday

On the Sunday, Michael Meeks also presented a lightning talk about the updates that have been implemented to Collabora Online (Nextcloud Office) over the past 6 months. We’re not sure how he managed to fit it all into 10 minutes as there’s been so many new features and improvements!

Watch Michael’s lightning talk here:

Download the Lightning Talk Slides
Download the Workshop Slides

To find out more about our integration with Nextcloud, check out our Nextcloud partner page.

See where we’ll be exhibiting or visiting next:

New Release for your Pocket – Collabora Office for Mobile 23.05

Powerful Office Productivity in Your Pocket

Cambridge, September 21, 2023 – Today we are pleased to announce the availability of a new major release of Collabora Office for Android and iOS. This updated version of our free app includes new and improved productivity features, greater document compatibility and a much improved user experience.

Today’s world of work is far more distributed and mobile. Collabora Office for Android and iOS allows you to edit documents directly on your phone or tablet, maintaining your privacy and putting you in full control of your data and documents, any time, any place.

The apps for Android and iOS complete our enterprise-ready Collabora Office product range – consisting of desktop versions for Linux, MacOS and Windows and our flagship product Collabora Online.

New Features

Dark Mode

The widely requested dark mode functionality that was added in Collabora Online 23.05 has come to mobile. There are multiple ways to activate dark mode – either from the main screen, or whilst in a document.

  • From the Home Screen, select the hamburger icon in the top left, click ‘Settings’, ‘Choose theme’ and choose between ‘Dark’ ‘Light’ or ‘System default’.
  • From within a document, select the hamburger icon in the top right, click ‘View’ and select ‘Dark Mode’. To switch off, do the same and untick ‘Dark Mode’.

Insert Form & Content Controls

You can now create forms and insert content controls in Writer, and export them into a fillable PDF file. This feature has been included from our Collabora Online 23.05 release.

  • To insert a field on mobile, select the ‘Insert’ icon on the top right bar and scroll to the bottom, select ‘Form’. From there you can choose which content controls to insert.
  • To modify the options, select the content control, re-select ‘Insert’, ‘Form’ and choose ‘Properties’.
Create forms on mobile with a variety of options

Calc Sparklines

Calc has seen the addition of Sparklines and the ability to define spreadsheet print areas which were introduced in the Collabora Online 22.05 release.

Sparklines are mini-charts found in Microsoft’s XLSX format. There are three different ways of displaying Sparklines: as lines, bar charts or stacked as win-loss charts. Sparklines are always defined for one cell, but different ones can be grouped together.

  • To insert a Sparkline, long tap and scroll to the bottom of the ‘cut, copy’ dialog. Select ‘Sparkline’, customise the options, and select ‘OK’.
  • To edit or remove, long tap on the Sparkline, scroll to the bottom of the ‘cut, copy’ dialog. Select ‘Sparkline’, and choose between the various edit and delete options.
Sparklines are now available on mobile

Define Print Area

For anyone who has tried to print a large spreadsheet, you will know that having a defined print area is essential to avoid wasting paper or having cells spread across multiple pages. Now you can define print areas on the Collabora Office for Mobile Apps to easily print on-the-go.

  • To define a print area, select the cells you want to be in the print area, click the hamburger menu in the top right corner and select ‘Define print area’.

Feature Improvements

Many already available features have seen improvements and updates in Collabora Office for Mobile 23.05. For example:

  • More list options – newly added “Outline Format” and “No list” buttons.
  • Improved Formula bar – the formula bar has been revamped. It’s now completely rendered on the client side. Also seeing many more enhancements such as better collapse and expand functionality and much better text selection handling.
  • Improved Active Slide – when using Impress, the active or selected slide is now easier to discern with an outline style.

MobileWizard Popup

The MobileWizard popup is now being utilised in more dialog boxes for increased consistency throughout the app.

  • Hyperlink panel – this has been completely revamped and improved. It’s now appears as a MobileWizard popup, making it easier to work with hyperlinks.
  • Improved Comments – similarly to the hyperlink panel, this has been revamped in a MobileWizard popup and all the following actions are operated within the same place/component: View comment list, Modify comment, Reply comment and Insert comment.
  • Improved Rename Sheet – long tap on a sheet tab then choose “Rename Sheet…”. This now uses the MobileWizard popup, making it easier to reach those input fields no matter the size of the smartphone.
MobileWizard popups are more consistent in the latest 23.05 mobile release

Performance Improvements

Collabora Office 23.05 for mobile has received many performance improvements that we have been working on throughout the 22.05 life-cycle, and you will already see included in the Collabora Online core.

Collabora Office 23.05 on Tablet

The Collabora Office tablet apps have also seen some updates. Along with various performance and bug fixes, there are a few notable new feature improvements.

Rename Document Dialog

It is now possible to rename the current opened document without closing it. Before this change, or whenever the window was too small to show the document name, renaming from within the file was not possible. The user would have to use the native files app to do so.

  • Now simply navigate to “File” tab, tap the “Rename” button. The “Rename Document” dialog appears and the user can rename the current document without leaving the app.
Renaming documents can now be done without leaving the document

New Document Search Button

With the new “Search” button, it’s easier to trigger a document search without multiple clicks, even if the Status bar is hidden.

  • Navigate to the “Home” tab and swipe left to see the last buttons in that tab. Tap “Search”.
Search documents more easily with the ‘Search’ button in the notebook bar

Thanks to the Community

Collabora has invested significantly in bringing a host of new features and functionality to this latest release and contributes the vast majority of the Collabora Online code. However, this release is a community effort, and we fully appreciate and acknowledge everyone’s hard work that has made it possible! We want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues in the wider LibreOffice community who helped to contribute not only to this, but also to the underlying LibreOffice technology upon which CODE and Collabora Online are built.

All of our code is open source and available to the public on GitHub. Join the Collabora Online Community, take part in easy hacks and discussions in the forum.

Download Collabora Office for Mobile 23.05

Collabora Office for iOS, Android and Chrome OS is available through the Play Store and App Store. We also provide the latest snapshot .apk for Android for download! While the iOS version is already available to all users, the Android and Chrome OS releases will be rolled to Play Store users gradually. A vibrant and welcoming community has evolved around Collabora Online & Collabora Office – so if you would like to get in touch or get involved, visit us in the forum or at GitHub.

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity is a leading provider of innovative software solutions, catering to the needs of individuals and businesses worldwide. With a focus on usability, performance, and security, Collabora Online empowers users to accomplish their goals efficiently and effectively.

Collabora Office for Mobile 23.05 is the latest Android and iOS release of our widely integrated, secure office suite.

Collabora Office 23.05 Unveils Exciting New Features, Empowering Users with Enhanced Productivity and Interoperability Features

The new Collabora Office 23.05 brings more features, improved performance and increased interoperability

Cambridge, August 7, 2023 – We are happy to announce the new major release of Collabora Office 23.05.

Collabora Office, for Linux, Windows and Mac, is the enterprise version of the world’s most popular open-source office productivity suite, LibreOffice. It is the foundation for new versions of our online collaborative office, Collabora Online, and also powers our apps for iOS, Android and Chrome OS.

The enterprise office suite provides businesses and professionals a richly featured, secure document creation environment with Long-Term Support (LTS) and bespoke development services backed by decades of experience.

Collabora Office’s new release includes new features targeting three key areas: accessibility, interoperability and usability. Below you will find an overview of the exciting new features and improvements that are available in Collabora Office 23.05 and where you can download it.

Accessibility Features

Accessibility features are created to provide comfort to all users, for example, those who prefer to use just a keyboard, those who cannot see the screen very well or those who have impairments.

Dark Mode

Dark Mode has seen over 40 bug fixes and improvements and further support for switching between dark and light mode manually.

To toggle dark mode on and off:

Along the top navigation bar select: Tools → Options

Collabora Office → View → Appearance Mode: “System”, “Light”, “Dark”
Toggle between light and dark mode

Interoperability Features

For some time, users and organizations have faced a major challenge when trying to find an alternative to Microsoft’s widely-used productivity suite: the issue of file compatibility and interoperability. These improvements continue to build on our already solid base of excellent interoperability and are fully compatible across both the desktop and online versions of Collabora Office.

Document Themes

Document themes are predefined formatting settings that you can apply to a whole document to easily change and re-purpose its appearance, add your own branding and give it a consistent feel. They usually include a combination of specific colours and fonts for heading, subheadings and body text. When the formatting is changed within the theme, it will change across all parts of the document following that formatting.
Themes also allows the user to choose between multiple default looks of objects when inserting and changing, which are derived from the current theme.

To apply a document theme:

Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme’
Select the theme you’d like to apply
Press ‘Ok’

To create a document theme

Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme → Add’

From here you can define colours for each part of your document.

Change and customise your Document Theme via a dialog box

Multi-page Floating Tables in Writer

This new feature is a combination of two existing capabilities. Multi-page tables and floating tables. Multi-page tables are tables than span their content over more than one page. Floating tables are tables inside a floating frame. This allows you to wrap text around them, which is particularly useful for brochures. Previously, it was not possible to combine these two features.

Floating frames used to work only on a single page. Now you can create floating tables that span across multiple pages. It improves interoperability with Microsoft’s OOXML format. It also significantly improves interoperability with tables that have been accidentally floated by users in Microsoft Office – often by just adjusting table sizing and positioning. This is frequently a problem in mis-designed Government forms – where tables are used for rendering borders, these should render and be editable with this update.

If you are interested in the complex technical challenges behind this feature, we encourage you to take a look into the series of posts by developer Miklos Vajna. There’s also a very insightful talk presented at COOL Days 2023 on YouTube. This feature is is still under active development, with some minor issues on specific use-cases to be ironed out, but you can make use of it in Collabora Office 23.05 now.

Multi-page Floating Tables in Collabora Office 23.05

Compact View of Pivot Tables

Pivot Tables are a flexible and powerful analysis tool for mixed data sets. Collabora Office can create and import Pivot Tables. The feature had first been introduced to in early 2021 together with numerous statistical tools. Meanwhile, the feature has seen further interoperability improvements. Collabora Office Calc is now able to preserve the more recent default compact Pivot Tables created in Excel. In addition to the more accurate visual representation, this improvement also avoids incorrect cell references.

Multi-Stop Gradients

Exciting improvements have been made to the under-the-hood renderer! Our rendering engine has been enhanced and can now handle even more complex gradients. You can now turn up the visual appeal of your document by incorporating multi-stop gradients into shapes, borders, and other elements. This update is essential for anyone who works with intricate graphics – bringing improvements and better interoperability for existing documents and making it easier to edit more complex designs and graphics.

Improved Frame Anchoring and Position

Collabora Office 23.05 includes improved compatibility with older document-framing descriptions including better positioning for frame handling, better support for combining/splitting frames and overlapping frames, fixes to some cases where parent styles were ignored, and fixes to avoid UI anchor changes that caused movement on the page.

64-bit Zip Support

The Zip64 standard extends numerous internal limitations in the XLSX and ODS formats used to compress documents. While the old zip limitations are enough for most practical user cases, documents with enormous amounts of content embedded could occasionally run into such limits. With support for Zip64 included in 23.05, editing and working with huge spreadsheets is now possible in Collabora Office. Zip64 also serves as a replacement – replacing the older standard for smaller files.

Zip64 support makes for exciting news for all, whether you’re a pro handling massive documents or a casual user who will surely benefit from the interoperability improvements! Everyone can expect improvements across the board.

Usability

Keyboard Navigation through Forms

You can use the tab key to circularly navigate through content controls and fieldmarks. The modern content controls have a tabIndex field, which allows for precise ordering of keyboard navigation. The tabIndex also allows a control to be skipped – which is useful to avoid getting stuck in rich text controls (since the tab key needs to insert a tab character in that case). Form developers can specify the tabIndex via the content control properties UI.

Navigate easily through forms using the tab key

Page Number Wizard

A wizard dialogue box has been added, combining inserting the required headers, footers, and page number fields into a single, easy to use, familiar dialog for users. This features all the common alignment options, support for a variety of languages, and a preview.

Simply select ‘Insert → Page Number...’

and you will see a dialogue box appear which enables you to customise the positioning, alignment and style of page numbers, along with a preview. There are a variety of supported languages available.

To remove page numbers, simply delete the page number in one of the footers and it will remove the page numbers on all pages.

Insert page numbers with the new Page Number Wizard

Other New Features

  • New ‘plain text’, ‘combo box’ and titles and tags options in Content Controls.
  • Added support to open multi image TIFF files.
  • Auto fitting text scaling algorithm has been changed so it works similar to MS Office.
  • Categorized link targets when linking to a presentation.

Community

Collabora has invested significantly in bringing a host of new features and functionality to this latest release and contributes a vast majority of the Collabora Office code. However, we want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues in the wider LibreOffice community who helped to contribute not only to this, but also to the underlying LibreOffice Technology upon which Collabora Office, CODE and Collabora Online are built.

All of our code is open source and available to the public on GitHub. Join the Collabora Online Community, take part in easy hacks and discussions in the forum.

Here are some new features contributed by the LibreOffice community.

Typographical Editing

New optional hyphenation settings are available to give rules for adjusting text flow. You can now limit hyphenation within paragraphs, set a minimum word length for hyphenation and opt to not hyphenate the last word of a paragraph.

This work was done by László Németh, NISZ.

Typographical Editing Options

Change Tracking in Numbered Lists

When making changes within numbered lists, the numbering has now been fixed to show actual and original numbers within the document.

Example of new change tracking in numbered lists

Table Style Design Support

You can now modify table styles and create new ones in Impress and Draw. Modified styles are saved into documents, and can be shared via templates. You can access this function by right-clicking on a design in the Table Design Sidebar panel.

This work was done by Maxim Monastirsky.

Table Design Options in the Sidebar

Other community wins include:

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity is a leading provider of innovative software solutions, catering to the needs of individuals and businesses worldwide. With a focus on usability, performance, and security, Collabora Office and Online empower users to accomplish their goals efficiently and effectively.

Collabora Office is the latest enterprise release of our desktop office suite based on LibreOffice Technology, for professional, mobile, and online use. Collabora Office 23.05 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 outstanding work done by so many that is included into Collabora Office 23.05. Our annual release, contains code that was contributed to LibreOffice 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6. For a deep dive on all details and credits, please do take a look at the release notes.

It’s easy to migrate to Collabora Office 23.05 or try Collabora Office 23.05 for yourself! Just head to the Collabora Office page and request your demo today, or download on the Windows or Mac App store.

If you would like to help test out the very latest Collabora Office versions before official release, you can download the development snapshots.