Collabora presenting the 2021 LibreOffice & Online growth infographic

In the aftermath of this year’s LibreOffice conference, we are glad to provide you with the latest update of our LibreOffice growth infoGraphic, including beautiful visuals and interesting numbers! We do hope you appreciate it and would love to hear your feedback. And of course, it is great if you find the format, in which it is presented, convenient to share.

Despite the challenges posed by the global pandemic in general, the statistics around LibreOffice collaboration are impressive. Although the total number of contributions to the LibreOffice core has slightly dropped compared to the year before, our developers remain top code contributors to LibreOffice with 4188 code commits (32.3%). The popular Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE), for home use & small teams, saw over 70 million Docker image pulls! We are glad to acknowledge, that the move of Collabora Online to GitHub has resulted in an increased number of contributions from the community. We are truly grateful to the growing number of partners, customers and volunteers for making this work possible.

The number of worldwide Collabora Online partners has raised to 230, the Collabora Office app for Android, iOS and Chrome OS saw 500,000 installations and the last year’s joint online conference by LibreOffice and SUSE did welcome over 130 participants from all over the world.

Would you like to see some previous versions of the info graph? Please find them here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 & 2016.

So, without further ado, please have a look at the updated LibreOffice growth infoGraphic on 2021 here:

 

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GSoC 21 Projects mentored by Collabora for LibreOffice

Collabora mentors students on LibreOffice projects during this year’s Google Summer of Code

Summer is synonymous with the opportunity to participate in beautiful projects. Let’s look at the students who work in improving LibreOffice during the Google Summer of Code. This year, four of the approved GSoC projects for the LibreOffice community are mentored by Collabora developers. Find out about the improvements they are currently implementing!

Tests for the VCL graphic backends

The Visual Class Library (VCL) tests identifies if a graphic backend works correctly. This is especially important if the backend depends on the client hardware or drivers (like e.g. on Skia/Vulkan). This task’s main objective is adding more test cases to the pre-existing tests, and implementing a usable UI for users to test the graphic’s feasibility themselves. This project can be considered as of medium difficulty and requires C++ knowledge. It has been taken over by Akshit Kushwaha who is being mentored by Collaborans Tomaž Vajngerl and Luboš Luňák.

Creating a powerful Text Style deck

Text Style deck mock-up by the LibreOffice design team

The current styles deck sidebar is going to see a redesign. The paragraph and character styles will be merged into a single Text Style deck, as illustrated in the mock-up to the left. Furthermore, Anshu Khare, who has picked-up this project, does also want to rework the filter workflow. Anshu Khare is being mentored by Collaborans Tomaž Vajngerl and Mike Kaganski and Heiko Tietze from the LibreOffice design team.

Making SVM format independent of the VCL Metafile

The SVM file is a 1-to-1 pullout of the content of the VCL Metafile. We mentioned the VCL already before. It is a complex code area and since the SVM should not change, stay consistent, modernizing and updating VCL is very hard. Now after this task, there will be a test for the SVM format. And there will also be new classes, making it easier to update/improve VCL. This project can be considered of medium difficulty. It is being taken over by Panos Korovesis who is being mentored by Tomaž Vajngerl and Miklos Vajna.

100 paper cuts

100 Paper Cuts is a versatile and multifaceted project in which Bayram Çiçek will be implementing enhancement requests and solving some issues on the UX side of LibreOffice. This requires knowledge in C++ and the ability to read other peoples code. Due to its nature, the difficulty of this project can vary. Bayram Çiçek is being mentored by Collaboran Muhammet Kara and Heiko Tietze from the LibreOffice design team.

More Projects – Boost.Gil 2D convolution and correlation

Apart from those for the LibreOffice project, Collaboran developers participate in other Google Summer of Code projects. For the Boost C++ Libraries organization, a 2D convolution and correlation algorithm aligned with existing 1D convolution and correlation is to be implemented. Prathamesh Tagore will improve the existing prototype and make it ready for release. He is being mentored by Collaboran Pranam Lashkari, who was himself a successful GSoC scholarship holder a few years ago.

We wish all participants an equally successful and insightful summer and would like to thank all mentors for devoting the time necessary for the success of these projects. At Collabora, we believe that the sharing of knowledge is an essential part of open source and also a driver of progress and innovation.

Searching for a mentor? Join us GitHub!

Google Summer of Code is an excellent opportunity to learn to work in many open-source projects. But where to find mentors during the rest of the year? We suggest you to take a look at the code of Collabora Online on GitHub and join the growing community there, with easy hacks to get started and regular round-ups. Community Mentor Muhammet Kara and the rest of our team of open-source developers are there and willing to share their vast experience.

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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!

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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.

Get the latest improvements with our desktop Collabora Office 6.4-39

Version 6.4-39 of Collabora Office improves the import of XML files, and brings useful and important fixes.

 

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XML import improved

A limitation with the import of XML files is removed. Previously XML tags/names with special characters (UTF-8) blocked importing and that works nicely now. You find this feature under Data > XML Source… .

 

Working on the next major release

Our engineers work hard on preparing the new major 21-version of Collabora Office, that will come with a whole lot of improvements and new features, with business support by the experts and with regular updates.
Do keep an eye on our announcements, or actually test the features with the Collabora Office 21 Snapshot.

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More about Collabora Office

Read all about the latest developments of Collabora’s business version of LibreOffice in the release notes. And the main 6.4 announcement; shows how Collabora Office helps to improve your control over documents and privacy.

Gutter Margins and PPTX import improvements available in Collabora Office 6.4-33

Version 6.4-33 of Collabora Office introduces the new Gutter Margins feature developed by Collabora to the desktops and includes several fixes regarding the PPTX import, improving the way Collabora Office handles shaped Bitmaps.
The latest developments around our business-hardened and supported LibreOffice distribution are documented inside the release notes. Learn more about how Collabora Office can help you to control your data and business in our 6.4 announcement; or order a free demo!

 

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Improving printed publications with Gutter Margins

Collabora Office 6.4-33. Add Gutter Margins to text documents

The Gutter Margin feature has first been published in Collabora Online 6.4.6. The new Writer feature adds an extra space to the side margin, top margin, or inside margins of documents. The gutter margin makes sure that the text of a printed publication is not obscured by the binding. Since the Gutter Margins feature is also available in Microsoft Word, this feature is an interoperability improvement, too.

How to use Gutter Margins

Access the Gutter Margin feature via the menu option Format > Page Styles… and select the page tab. Alternatively, you can access the Page Style though a right-click or via a left-click on the style button in the status bar at the bottom. Inside the Page Style dialog you will find several new options to adjust the size and the position of the gutter.

Gutter Margins: The new settings are available inside the Page Style dialog

 

PPTX import improvements for shaped bitmaps

Collabora Office 6.4-33 includes improvements on the PPTX import of shaped images

Collabora Office 6.4-33 includes various code stability fixes and improvement regarding the import of shaped bitmap images created in MS Office. Earlier, shaped bitmap graphics of PPTX presentations could be rendered inaccurately, or in some cases the shape could get lost. Thank you to SUSE for sponsoring this work. This is fix is another great interoperability improvement that will also become available in the next version of LibreOffice.

Original: shaped image produced in MS Office
Earlier: Shaped images might not be imported accurately into LibreOffice & Collabora Office
Collabora Office 6.4-33: true to the original PPTX import of shaped images

 

Read more about Collabora Office 6.4

Read all about the new Collabora Office 6.4. Or try it yourself! Just head to the Collabora Office page and request your demo today, or simply click the button below.

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