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.
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 .
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.
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 .
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, 19 authors have pushed 77 commits to master and 156 commits to all branches. On master, 164 files have changed and there have been 15,979 additions and 12,825 deletions.
Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from November 27, 2020 to December 04, 2020
COOL Weekly Meeting #4 has taken place on Thursday, December 03, 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:
During the quick update part by Muhammet Kara, it’s been reported that COOL has got 41 new contributors (20+ code contributors) since the move to GitHub.
Toolbar changes (by Andreas Kainz) now has a new issue opened for UI changes which is waiting for review from Pedro Silva. Then new pieces of change will be pushed to master based on feedback.
Ellipsis button proposed to provide a way of opening related dialogs directly from toolbars
Contextual toolbars (by Andreas Kainz) also got a new issue for communication and tracking the progress. It has been reported that JavaScript file looks more complicated than the file for the menu bar, and it is proposed to be chopped into smaller pieces to reduce complexity.
On the topic of Dynamic Changes of Toolbar Type (by Gabriel Masei), the results of the initial experimentation has been shared, and further options such as making use of a per-user option on the core side for toolbar preference have been discussed. Gabriel Masei will continue working on the topic with the help of Szymon Szymon Kłos, and discussing certain options with Jan Holesovsky. Miklos Vajna has also shared a nice blog post on effective code review and backporting for Collabora Online.
Gökay Şatır shared an update on his work of CanvasTileLayer which means a better look with crisp pixels at every zoom level. It’s been reported that Writer and Impress are the latest winners who got some improvements on this. It will also be backported to the 6.4.x series.
Pedro Silva and Andreas Kainz shared updates and discussed the next steps regarding the CSS class names step of the icon theming topic. It’s been decided that details will be discussed on a separate call involving the related parties.
It’s been reported that Impress got some recent speedup improvements by Mert Tümer (Impress tile rendering and watermarks) and Tomaž Vajngerl (PDF rendering).
Szymon Kłos has shared updates on his work around auto-filters and pivot table dialogs, which are still work in progress.
Andreas Kainz proposed a coherent approach to maintain user interfaces of COOL, and it has been discussed from different angles. Details of the discussion can be found in the minutes of the meeting.
Nicolas Christener shared an update on his work to prepare a blog post about the iOS app upgrade and provided a link to preview the draft.
It’s been mentioned that now everything -PC, Online, mobile, etc.- are all on the same 6.4.x base, which makes it easier to coherently maintain all for the developers, and easier to follow for the deployers and the users alike.
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 10, 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)
Thanks to Henry Castro for fixing[0][1] an issue which caused a Writer document to partially fall outside the visible area after certain operations like zoom in and zoom out, and also for doing some under-the-hood improvements on our build system.
Thanks to Szymon Kłos for various improvements and fixes on the notebookbar and various dialogs such as the pivot table dialog, turning them into native widgets for COOL, thus allowing a more natural look & feel along with less clutter and possibly better user experience.
Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for improving the performance of change tracking by removing some unnecessary checks and iterations, and also for making sure the correct document is used while copying and moving around Calc’s sheet tabs.
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, and also for reviewing pull requests of other contributors, and for mentoring them through tough issues.
Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for a lot of fixes and improvements around cypress (testing framework), and the testing facilities for certain integrations, thus helping COOL have an even better automated quality assurance process, and also for mentoring other contributors while writing new cypress tests.
Thanks to Thaís Vieira for adding cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items of Impress, such as font color and highlight color.
Thanks to Pedro Silva for various fixes and improvements around the user interface of COOL to make it have a better and consistent look and feel across different platforms.
Thanks to Andras Timar for various fixes and improvements around our docker images and documentation as well as for cleaning up the code-base by removing some unnecessary bits and updating localizations.
Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for various user interface and user experience fixes and improvements such as making sure menu entries are not overlapped by the menu bar, and adding new easy ways to arrange Calc sheets through commands move sheet left and move sheet right as well as the move/copy dialog on the desktop browsers.
Thanks to Michael Meeks for helping COOL have a less-cluttered code-base and potentially perform better by removing obsolete locking and conditions around MessageQueue.
Thanks to Mert Tümer for various performance fixes and improvements especially around watermarks and PDF handling.
Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving the performance and stability of COOL by fixing an issue that caused certain text documents with tables to trigger a continuous loop of tile requests, as well as various other fixes and improvements such as adding a subcommand to our g script to easily backport all commits of a pull request, thus making lives of contributors a bit easier.
Thanks to Rashesh Padia for adding a message box to the admin console to indicate when the server is shut down, thus improving UX for the administrators.
Collabora Office on Android & iOS
Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for various fixes and improvements on the iOS app such as making sure emojis work properly.
Using the Emoji keyboard on the Collabora Office iOS app
Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for updating the target SDK version for Android app from 28 to 29, thus helping it keep up with the current technology.
Collabora Online Integrations
Thanks to Julius Härtl for improving domain configuration and handling of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, along with various other improvements under-the-hood.
Thanks to Szymon Kłos for improving the user experience of built-in CODE support of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by making sure the timeout is long enough for the server to start and proper checks are in place for it.
Thanks to Jan Ackermann for helping Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration provide a better user experience and be future-proof by updating the context menu entry “Edit” as “Open with Collabora”, and replacing a deprecated function call with its modern alternative.
Thanks to Thomas Müller for updating translations of Collabora Online’s ownCloud integration thus helping it to have better support for different languages.
Thanks to Andreas Grabs for improving the user interface and experience of Collabora Online’s Moodle integration by fixing iframe height to make sure COOL status bar is shown properly.
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 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!
Thanks to Gülşah Köse for making sure dotted lines in PPTX files don’t disappear during presentations, thus improving interoperability with other office suites.
Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for fixing the Firebird build on macOS on arm64, thus ensuring macOS users on certain platforms will be able to get better support for using databases with LibreOffice.
Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for fixing an issue that caused certain PDF files with a lot of graphics to use an excessive amount of disk space for caching, thus improving overall stability and performance of LibreOffice while working with PDF files.
Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.
Thanks to Miklos Vajna for his work towards better handling of cached field results in Writer, thus potentially improving the performance and user experience of LibreOffice. Check out his blog post for the whole story!
Old, broken render result in Writer
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.
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.
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.
Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from November 13, 2020 to November 20, 2020
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! 🙂
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)
Thanks to Tamás Zolnai for a lot of fixes and improvements around cypress (testing framework), and the testing facilities for certain integrations, thus helping COOL have an even better automated quality assurance process, and also for mentoring other contributors while writing new cypress tests.
Thanks to Szymon Kłos for various improvements and fixes[0][1] on the notebookbar such as making sure the sidebar tooltips have correct positioning.
Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for various fixes and improvements towards increasing general stability of COOL and maintainability of the code-base, and also for reviewing pull requests of other contributors.
Thanks to Thaís Vieira for adding cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items of Impress, such as Italic, Underline, and Strikethrough.
Thanks to Gleb Popov for continuing his work on bringing Collabora Online to FreeBSD, with many commits.
Thanks to Pedro Silva for various fixes and improvements around the user interface of COOL to make it have a better and consistent look and feel across different platforms. He has also improved the UX of COOL a bit more by making sure it is now easier to differentiate between insert and overwrite mode in the status bar.
Thanks to Aron Budea for improving support for Debian GNU/Linux.
Thanks to Mert Tümer for making sure status of automatic spell checking feature is properly remembered on first start, and many other fixes and improvements especially around the Android app and the support for Chromebooks.
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!
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.
