collabora-office-21-06-brings-enhanced-productivity-and-smoother-migration_embargo-202106281200

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

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.

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.