Collabora Productivity at FOSDEM 2023

30 January 20237 February 2023 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

FOSDEM 2023 – Back in Brussels

FOSDEM 2023 is back home in Brussels. Meet the Collabora Productivity team at Europe’s largest gathering of open-source developers and have a chat, some fries or a beer with us (also: make sure to grab some stickers!). As usual, our engineers will be giving talks about the latest developments in Collabora Online, Collabora Office and LibreOffice at the LibreOffice Technology devroom. Here’s the schedule!

Saturday, February 4th 2023

Collabora at the LibreOffice Technology devroom

Noel Grandin

16:10 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details

Turbocharging an Elephant – Making LibreOffice Faster

Most of the easy tasks are already done. This talk covers several improvements to LibreOffice, that required lots of preparational work and interesting challenges to introduce improvements into a massive (and messy) codebase.

Pranam Lashkari

16:20 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details

Feature Locking and Feature Restriction – Integrator’s Way to Unlock Potential

In the talk, Pranam Lashkari will explain and demonstrate how feature locking and restrictions work in Collabora Online. Using such methods, integrators can control which features to deliver to which user or group.

Sarper Akdemir

16:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details

An Interoperability Improvement in LibreOffice Impress Tables

Sarper Akdemir tells the story of an interoperability bug fixing adventure where the problem turned out to be deeper than it appeared at first glance, showcasing how there are multiple approaches to a single interoperability problem.

Miklos Vajna

16:40 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details

Writer Content Controls – What Happened in the Past Half Year

LibreOffice was capable of handling form filling in Writer for a while already. In the meantime, the competition introduced Structured Document Tags. Writer Content Controls are meant to perform a great handling of this third type of form filling. See Miklos Vajna‘s talk about what we have done to bring themes to LibreOffice, hear what still needs doing and find out how you can help.

Access your free Collabora Online demo

Szymon Kłos

17:40 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details

LibreOfficeKit – Bridge Between Your Application and LibreOffice

Szymon Klos gives a short introduction into integrating LibreOffice using LibreOfficeKit with external software. He will describe the most important code pieces and show, where to look for information. Furthermore, he’ll demonstrate how to add new features, which API we provide, and what can be done with tiled rendering.

Michael Meeks

17:50 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details

Collabora Online Over Lockdown – How LibreOffice Technology in the Browser Got Better

Come and hear how Collabora Online (COOL) has improved over the COVID-19 era, not only in core feature-function, but also in ease of access and deployment for everyone. See how we can deliver scalable, secure, on-premise editing of your documents with a simple, easy to deploy office for the free world.

Pedro Pinto Silva

18:10 LibreOffice Technology devroom See details

Make Collabora Online Yours – Customize and Integrate it Everywhere

Collabora Online is quite flexible in the means that you can alter to your personal taste without the need to change other core components. Pedro Pinto Silva shows how to make Collabora Online yours. Discover all the shining new additions to the user interface and learn how to customize and integrate it everywhere.

Tor Lillqvist

18:30 – LibreOffice Technology devroom See details

Collabora Online and WASM – Assembling Off-line Collabora Online with the Web

Come hear Tor Lillqvist‘s talk about a new approach to enabling browser deployment of rich office functionality – built on top of allotropia’s investment in enabling the core LibreOffice technology to compile to Web Assembly (WASM) – combined with the Collabora Online front-end. Hear about how this can be used to provide a fall-back (non-collaborative) editing mode for when you lose network connectivity for a while, and about the plans to re-synchronize documents on the return from such a tunnel.

See the LibreOffice Technology devroom schedule

About Collabora Online

Collabora Online 22.05 is our latest enterprise release. It’s suitable for large-scale deployment, and comes with SLA, enterprise support with signed security updates as well as interaction with product management, helping to direct our development priorities. Collabora Online integrates flawlessly into Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, and many of the major file sync & share, groupware and hosting solutions. It’s ideal for organizations that want to collaborate on documents, without losing control over them or compromising on privacy. With the ability to host it on your own hardware or to integrate it into a trusted environment, Collabora Online is the ideal online office suite for digital sovereignty. Enterprises interested in using Collabora Online can check out our home page for more information on partner integrations and online demos. Hosting and Cloud businesses that wish to add Collabora Online to their product portfolio can become a partner. For any questions or tailored solutions, do not hesitate to contact hello@collaboraoffice.com.

Collabora at the Univention Summit 2023

25 January 202325 January 2023 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

The Univention Summit has returned to its traditional date. Before the pandemic, the event in Bremen was an annual kick-off for showing how valuable open source is for digital sovereignty in companies, educational institutions and public administration. We are pleased to have been able to contribute to the success of the conference as Gold Sponsors yet again this year.

Open-source solutions as part of a digital-sovereign perspective for societies

As in previous years, the Univention Summit managed to bring together crucial players for advancing Digital Sovereignty at this year’s congress. Many of the crises that illustrated the need for more sovereign solutions for Europe in recent years, such as European dependencies on global trade chains – eg in the area of semiconductor shortages, or resource dependency on Russia – made clear by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, remained topics of the Summit. There were also references to current examples, such as the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. The summit succeeded in positioning open-source technology and the innovative power of medium-sized companies as a way out of one-sided digital dependencies. Imagery of the summit can be found in in Univention’s blog, the recordings of the keynotes of the congress are available on their YouTube channel.

“Sustainable Digitalization rocks!”, keynote by Peter Ganten (Univention)

In focus: The digital-sovereign workplace

One of the central topics that determined this year’s summit was the dPhoenix Suite. The digital-sovereign workplace, provided for many thousands of employees in public administration, makes it possible to work simply, web-based & digitally sovereign. The dPhoenix Suite combines various open-source modules from different manufacturers and is hosted on German data centres. The modules, from file sharing, email, video conferencing and office application are developed in Germany and Europe. Collabora Online is the online office application software within the dPhoenix Suite.

The Univention Summit 2023 in took place at the Metropol Theater in Bremen

The Collabora stand at the Univention Summit 2023

Workshop: Collaboration and document security with Collabora Online

The second day of the Univention Summit was dedicated to workshops. Many visitors made use of the opportunity to deepen the impressions gained in the talks and at the stands. On the second day of the congress, we from Collabora held a very well-attended workshop on “Collaboration and Document Security with Collabora Online” in the Haus der Wissenschaft. Here, people who have not yet had the opportunity to work with Collabora Online had the chance to learn about the advantages of our software, while other users took the opportunity to hear first-hand about recent and upcoming developments. The slides of the presentation (in German) are available for download here.

Click on the image to download the slides!

Thank you to all participants

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all those involved. Many thanks to the Univention team for organising another great event. We were very happy to be part of a lively exchange with our numerous partners on site and to have many interesting conversations with visitors at our stand. We are excited to build a more transparent, more open and more reliable digital future together with you! See you again at the Univention Summit 2024!

Experience Collabora Online

We had many great talks at the Univention Summit…

…showcasing the technical capabilities of Collabora Online.

Find more pictures from the summit in Univention’s blog!

Keep an eye out for where we’ll be next:

COOL Days

April 8-10, 2024 – Cambridge, UK

Nextcloud Enterprise Day

April 24, 2024 – Munich, Germany

OW2Con

June 11-12, 2024 – Paris, France

How to make use of AI based translations with DeepL in Collabora Online

14 December 202216 December 2022 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

DeepL Translations Available in Collabora Online

If you are one of those who often work with documents in multiple languages, this is something that might be interesting for you. Thanks to Adfinis, Collabora Online now offers the possibility to translate parts of your document with a just few clicks. DeepL is a leading AI company based in Germany. It offers the DeepL translator based on machine learning that provides translations to many languages in an exceptional quality. Additional languages are constantly being added to the service. It is now possible to make use of these high-quality translations directly in Collabora Online.

Selecting text for a DeepL translation in Collabora Online

Technical Set-up

The DeepL translation is supported since Collabora Online 22.05.7.3 released in November 2022. Before you can make use of the feature in Collabora Online, you have to enable some configurations. DeepL offers an API that provides programmatic access to DeepL’s machine translation technology. To make use of it, you will need an API-Key. The DeepL-API settings need to be enabled inside coolwsd.xml. You can find the technical details inside the Collabora Online SDK. Note that content of the document you translate, will be sent to the cloud API. If you are interested in some more technical background on this feature, you can watch Jan Holesovsky‘s talk on this from the COOL Days 2022 event.

How to Translate Text in Collabora Online

Once the feature is correctly set up, it’s straight-forward to use the translation feature. In a Writer document, select the text you would like to have translated. Inside the Review tab (NotebookBar, Tabbed view) you will find a Translate button. If you are using the Compact View of the Collabora Online UI, you’ll find the Translate feature inside the Tools menu. When clicking on it, a dialog will appear, allowing you to select the target language. Select the target language from the drop-down menu. The translated text is now available inside your document. Generally, the translation will preserve the basic formatting of the original content, however, depending on the length of the translation or the complexity of the formatting, you might need to do some smaller readjustments of the paragraph.

3 Steps to Translating with DeepL in Collabora Online

Select the text you would like to translate
Click on the Translate button inside the Review tab (or in Tools)
Select the target language from the dialog

Target Languages Available For Translations

The DeepL team is constantly adding new languages to their service. Currently, as of December 2022, the translation feature supports translations to the following 28 languages:

Bulgarian 🇧🇬
Chinese 🇨🇳 (simplified)
Czech 🇨🇿
Danish 🇩🇰
Dutch 🇳🇱
German 🇩🇪
Greek 🇬🇷
English 🇺🇸 (American)
English 🇬🇧 (British)
Estonian 🇪🇪
Finish 🇫🇮
French 🇫🇷
Hungarian 🇭🇺
Indonesian 🇮🇩

Italian 🇮🇹
Japanese 🇯🇵
Lithuanian 🇱🇹
Latvian 🇱🇻
Polish 🇵🇱
Portuguese 🇧🇷 (Brazilian)
Portuguese 🇵🇹 (European)
Romanian 🇷🇴
Russian 🇷🇺
Slovak 🇸🇰
Slovenian 🇸🇮
Spanish 🇪🇸
Swedish 🇸🇪
Turkish 🇹🇷

Please be aware, the quality of the translation might differ between different target languages, depending on the machine learning progress of each language in DeepL. New languages will become available as soon as they are supported in DeepL.

Try it in Collabora Online or CODE

The DeepL feature has been introduced to Collabora Online in the release of Collabora Online 22.05.7.3. You can test the feature in our free demo. Tech enthusiasts may also like to test it inside an installation of CODE, the free Collabora Online Development Edition, intended for home users and Developers who would like to help to test the latest features first. Find all the instructions here.

Free Collabora Online Demo

Thank You for Making this Possible

This feature was made possible by the funding of our Swiss Partner Adfinis. Thank you, for helping us to create this feature. See our Consultancy page for more examples of projects we have worked on for our Partners and clients. Maybe you would like to partner with us? Find out more about how to become a Collabora Partner!

Collabora’s Contributions to the LibreOffice Conference 2022 in Milan

4 November 202215 August 2023 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

The Talks and Slides by Collaboran’s at the LibreOffice Conference 2022

The LibreOffice Conference 2022 (LibOCon) took place from September 28 to October 1 in Milan. It was the first LibreOffice Conference since the outbreak of the COVID-19 Pandemic that took place as an in-person event. Collabora was one of the sponsors, and a significant number of our developers contributed talks on various aspects of LibreOffice technology. Did you miss any of those? Don’t worry! All our talks are available for you on YouTube inside our LibOCon playlist. Please also feel free to download the slides we included in this blog post.

Keynotes and Advocating

Michael Meeks: Sponsor Keynote Collabora

Michael Meeks, Managing Director of Collabora Productivity, takes a look at the latest developments in LibreOffice from an organisational and ecosystem perspective. See details

Michael Meeks: The ongoing story of Online

Hear Michael Meeks tell the history of LibreOffice in the browser. From it’s pre-historic past as StarPortal, through gtk-broadway prototypes, to Collabora Online as we know it today. See details

Technical Talks

Sarper Akdemir: Chasing an Interoperability Bug in Impress

During the Quality Assurance track, Sarper Akdemir explained how to fix an interoperability bug by showcasing the whole process of understanding, fixing, and implementing tests. See details

Tomaž Vajngerl: Sparklines and Chart Data Tables – New Features in Calc

Sparklines are mini charts, that are drawn into a cell. In his talk, senior software engineer Tomaž Vajngerl presented the features and the challenges during the development. See details

Miklos Vajna : Content Controls in Writer

While LibreOffice and Collabora Office were already capable of filling forms via form controls or form fields, they can now also fully represent content controls. In this talk by Senior Software Engineer Miklos Vajna, see how this work was implemented! See details

Follow Collabora

Collabora Productivity created Collabora Online, a powerful online office suite, which you can integrate into your own infrastructure. It prioritises your digital sovereignty and provides you with all the tools to keep your data secure, without compromising on features. Collabora provides a wide range of products, as well as consulting services for enterprises and governments. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, Collabora is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice technology and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term support. Collabora’s multi-platform policy is completed with Collabora Office for iOS, Android, and Chrome OS. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

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How-to use Sparklines in Collabora Online

26 September 202215 August 2023 Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

What are Sparklines?

Sparklines are miniature charts that are heavily simplified and typically fit into a line of text or a cell on a spreadsheet. Their first appearances date back to 18^th century chivalric novels and the display of barometric signatures of the notorious 19^th century Krakatoa eruption. Unlike classic charts, Sparklines are meant to be succinct and located right where they are discussed. Microsoft’s XLSX format has included these mini-charts for quite some time. With the major release of Collabora Office 22.05, Sparklines became available within the LibreOffice technology ecosystem. Shortly afterwards, they were also implemented in Collabora Online 22.05 and LibreOffice 7.4.

Creating Sparklines in Collabora Online

If you open a .XLSX or .ODS spreadsheet including Sparklines inside Collabora Online, the miniature charts will be preserved. If you want to create a new Sparklines chart from scratch in Collabora Online, you should start by selecting the row or column of cells you would like to visualize. Right-click, and chose “Sparklines > Insert Sparklines…” from the context menu. The “Sparklines Properties” dialog will appear including the chosen input range. The button besides the “Output range” field allows you to choose the cell the Sparkline will be created in.

Select the data range from the row or column, right-click and choose “Insert Sparkline” to create a new miniture chart

In the “Sparkline Properties” dialog click on the “Output range” icon to postion the chart

Formatting Sparklines in Collabora Online

If you would like to edit or customise the appearance of a group of mini charts, right-click on the Sparklines and chose “Edit Sparkline Group…”. This will summon the “Sparkline Properties” dialog and grant access to several different settings. You can for instance choose between three different types of Sparklines. Just like Office 365, Collabora Online allows you to create a miniature Line Chart, a Column Chart or a Stacked Chart (Win/Loss). You can also customise the visual appearance by adjusting the line width or choosing individual colours for special points in the graph (marker, high/low point, first/last point).

Right-click on a Sparkline and choose “Edit Sparkline Group…” for the formatting options

Adjust the appearance of Sparklines inside the “Sparkline Properties” dialog

Test this in Collabora Online or CODE

The Sparkline feature has been introduced to Collabora Online with the major release 22.05. You can test the feature in our free demo. Tech enthusiasts may also like to test it inside an installation of CODE, the free Collabora Online Development Edition, intended for home users and Developers who would like to help to test the bleeding-edge features first. Find all the instructions here.