Powerful spreadsheet features arrive for tablets

 

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

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

 

Staged releases on Android devices

Since the upgrade to the new major branch Collabora Office 6.4 for mobile, we moved to a staggered release schedule. This means that new versions are made available to users gradually. Version updates will be rolled-out to users in sequential waves, so some will see version 6.4.3 sooner than others.

 

Available on Chromebooks

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

 

Download Collabora Office 6.4.3

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

 

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud, providing Collabora Online and a range of products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow Collabora Office on Twitter .

 

Collabora Online Community Roundup #8

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.

Screenshot of GitHub Pulse for Collabora Online
Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from November 27, 2020 to December 04, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to Lawrence D’Anna, Triopsi, baffclan, Jairo Llopis for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

  • Thanks to Lawrence D’Anna for letting us know about an issue with zoom levels on macOS Big Sur.
  • Thanks to Triopsi for reporting an issue about permissions in the COOL docker image.
  • Thanks to baffclan for opening an enhancement request for the iOS app to enhance the UX by adding an about dialog to the main menu.
  • Thanks to Jairo Llopis for letting us know about the lack of mouse support on tablets with DeX mode.

Thank you all, and welcome aboard! 🙂

Join the fun!

You can also join the fun, and be part of our next list of new contributors! 🙂

Just go to our GitHub repo, fork it, build it (on Linux or on any platform), grab one of our newcomer-friendly easy hacks, and send your first pull request. And if you get stuck at any point, just drop by one of our communication channels. 😉

Highlights

Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #4

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.

    With the Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) Docker Image you can host your own online Office Suite at home!
  • 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!

If you would like to help COOL speak your language, you can just go to our translation project on weblate, and start contributing! 😉

Collabora Online translation project on Weblate
Collabora Online translation project on Weblate

Collabora loves LibreOffice!

We’re still contributing to LibreOffice and encourage you too to do so because LibreOffice rocks. 😉

  • Thanks to 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

    New render result in Writer

Collabora Office 6.4 – our major release now ready for Android, iOS, and Chrome OS

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.

We welcome your feedback and questions on the Collabora Online forum! For contributions to testing, translating and development, we welcome you on Collabora Online on GitHub.

 

For use on F-Droid please see this information.


Info on release updates

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.

Collabora Online Community Roundup #7

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.

Screenshot of GitHub Pulse for Collabora Online
Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from November 13, 2020 to November 20, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to SaschaT667, JensTheCoder, BernhardGehl, accolon and Gabriel Filion for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

  • 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! 🙂

Just go to our GitHub repo, fork it, build it (on Linux or on any platform), grab one of our newcomer-friendly easy hacks, and send your first pull request. And if you get stuck at any point, just drop by one of our communication channels. 😉

Highlights

Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #3

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)

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

  • 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!

If you would like to help COOL speak your language, you can just go to our translation project on weblate, and start contributing! 😉

Collabora Online translation project on Weblate
Collabora Online translation project on Weblate

Collabora loves LibreOffice!

We’re still contributing to LibreOffice and encourage you too to do so because LibreOffice rocks. 😉

  • Thanks to 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.

Collabora Online Community Roundup #6

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.

Screenshot of GitHub Pulse for Collabora Online
Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from November 13, 2020 to November 20, 2020

New Contributors

Congratulations to Marco Bierbach and gohrner for reporting their first issues and improvement requests on our GitHub repository!

  • Thanks to Marco Bierbach for reporting an issue happening on macOS with a 4K monitor.
  • Thanks to gohrner for letting us know about a bug that affects the formula bar while using notebookbar interface.

Thank you all, and welcome aboard! 🙂

Join the fun!

You can also join the fun, and be part of our next list of new contributors! 🙂

Just go to our GitHub repo, fork it, build it (on Linux or on any platform), grab one of our newcomer-friendly easy hacks, and send your first pull request. And if you get stuck at any point, just drop by one of our communication channels. 😉

Highlights

Collabora Online Weekly Meeting #2

COOL Weekly Meeting #2 has taken place on Thursday, November 19, 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)
  • Icon theming for COOL leveraging SVG files (suggested by Andreas Kainz)
  • The blog post about iOS app upgrade (suggested by Nicolas Christener)
  • Pull requests pending review
  • Help for the new contributors to get started with COOL development on Android

Check out the meeting minutes for the details of the meeting, make your own suggestions for the next meeting, and join us on Thursday, November 26, 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 Pedro Silva for various fixes and improvements around the user interface of COOL to make it easier to maintain[0][1][2] and have a better and consistent look and feel[3][4] especially in the case of dialogs[5][6].
  • Thanks to Ayhan Yalçınsoy for upgrading our eslint version to 6.0.0. He has been working on preparing the code-base for the upgrade in the previous weeks. This will bring a bunch of fixes and improvements for one of our depended-on libraries and will ease maintaining code quality.

    ESLint is a pluggable and configurable linter tool for identifying and reporting on patterns in JavaScript.
  • Thanks to Ashod Nakashian for various fixes and improvements around watermark feature[0][1] and general stability of COOL and maintainability of the code-base.[2]
  • Thanks to Pranam Lashkari for fixing a bug which caused cell content selections on Calc documents not being properly updated after tapping on a different cell, and making sure correct author and date info is displayed for comment replies.
  • 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 making bringing notebookbar a bit closer to feature-completion by adding[0][1] conditional formatting submenu and advanced filter dialog, fixing a bug which caused screen-flickering while scrolling through a PDF document, ensuring[0][1] that related context (right-click) menu entries are shown when change-tracking is enabled on a Writer document, making sure comments are properly displayed after returning to an inactive document, as well as various other improvements and fixes.
  • Thanks to Nnamani Ezinne Martina for adding more cypress tests to ensure the quality of Collabora Online on various toolbar items such as Spacing, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough, Highlight Color, Font Color, Clear Direct Formatting, Apply Font Style, Apply Font Size, Add Decimal Places, Delete Decimal places, Format as Currency and Format as Percent.
  • Thanks to Jan Holesovsky for improving the user experience of COOL by disabling the Freeze panes menu and notebookbar entries on tablets which were confusing users because the related feature is not available there, and for making sure add and save options for comments are not shown when a user doesn’t have permission to edit the document.
  • Thanks to Michael Meeks for various fixes and improvements under-the-hood towards increased stability and reliability.[0][1]
  • Thanks to Mert Tümer for fixing a bug that was causing watermark text to be distorted in certain cases.

    Screenshot of a sample watermark text before and after the fix.

Collabora Office on Android & iOS

  • Thanks to Pedro Silva for improving the user experience on the iOS app by ensuring consistent button styling.
  • Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for fixing typing into tunneled dialogs, the dialogs coming from the LibreOffice core side, on hardware keyboards in the iOS app.

Collabora Online Integrations

  • Thanks to Julius Härtl for a lot of under-the-hood improvements on Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration, along with various improvements towards mobile apps[0][1], and also for reviewing and merging pull requests by other contributors.
  • Thanks to Roeland Jago Douma for improving configurability of Collabora Online’s Nextcloud integration by making the timeout value configurable.
  • Thanks to Andreas Grabs for doing under-the-hood improvements on the CI facilities of Collabora Online’s Moodle integration.

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 Mike Kaganski for mentoring other members of the team, and helping them get started.
  • Thanks to Yunusemre Şentürk for various tasks towards keeping our CI chains healthy.
  • Thanks to Andras Timar for keeping us organized, maintaining our translation project on Weblate, and delivering hot new releases of our software!
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Your friendly community mentor, Muhammet Kara, is also creating & improving easy hacks, running workshops, helping new contributors solving their setup & build issues and reviewing their pull requests, working on easing the build procedure, improving our GitHub presence bit by bit based on its community guidelines, compiling/composing these community updates…

Translators

Last but not least, we can’t thank enough to our translators who constantly help COOL and its friends talk many languages on this earth. Collabora Online speaks many languages, thanks to all of our translators in our translation project, and all of those who previously contributed and keeps contributing to our mother project, LibreOffice.

We’re continuing to work to find good ways to credit translators’ hard work in the product. Please see a list of those involved, and please get in touch if you’re not listed. Many thanks to all those who have worked on translating Online, you rock!

If you would like to help COOL speak your language, you can just go to our translation project on weblate, and start contributing! 😉

Collabora Online translation project on Weblate
Collabora Online translation project on Weblate

Collabora loves LibreOffice!

We’re still contributing to LibreOffice and encourage you too to do so because LibreOffice rocks. 😉

  • Thanks to Tor Lillqvist for releasing LibreOffice Vanilla 7.0.3.1 in the Mac App Store. He has also done various improvements towards LibreOffice support for ARM-Based Macs. Check out the blog post for details.
  • Thanks to Tomaž Vajngerl for doing various improvements[0][1][2] towards better PDF handling of Draw.
  • Thanks to Miklos Vajna for improving DOCX compatibility by fixing a bug that caused LibreOffice to crash while opening a DOCX file with tracked changes, as well as various other fixes for issues encountered while opening certain DOCX files.[0][1][2][3]
  • Thanks to Noel Grandin for doing various code-quality improvements and modernization all around the LibreOffice code-base.