Developers must never rely on client-side access control checks.1
With this simple statement, OWASP are putting a very big question mark over the head of any document editor that performs access controls in browser. So what is the big deal, and are client-side access controls really that bad? In this quick post, we’ll find out.
Distributing Data
What happens when a government employee views your tax records, the bank assesses your mortgage application, or your lawyers share documents regarding your case with each other? Depending on the application they are using, it turns out the first operation may well be for the server to make copies of the document for every editor or viewer, before sending the copies to each user’s device. In case it isn’t immediately obvious, this distributive flavour of document editing is extremely concerning for a number of reasons.
1. Lack of Server-Side Enforcement
As mentioned above, one of the core principles of OWASP regulations is enforcing security measures at the server-side. However, when full documents files are sent to the browser for editing, the server loses control over the data. This immediately undermines any ability to enforce security policy.
2. Vulnerabilities
If data files are sent with code to execute policy in the browser, then a malicious script, acting as a “browser” can simply download the document data and discard the policy logic. This exposes the data to potential cyber-attacks and data breaches. OWASP regulation 4.1.1 states this very simply as, “Verify that the application enforces access control rules on a trusted service layer, especially if client-side access control is present and could be bypassed”2, since “client-side logic is often easy to bypass”3. Whilst organisations rightly have training about whether secure USB sticks should or shouldn’t be used with company laptops, nobody is talking about the 3rd party access freely given by company servers to anything pretending to be a browser.
3. Duplicates
When dealing with sensitive (or arguably any) data, the last thing we should think about doing is photocopying it. TOP SECRET – EYES ONLY is a phrase we are familiar with from the world of spies and espionage, yet so often overlooked in the online world. We naively assume that this couldn’t be an issue with our document editor, yet with many services this is precisely what happens when we start a viewing session. Regulation 4.1.5 states developers should “Verify that access controls fail securely including when an exception occurs.” It’s impossible to imagine how any developer can possibly verify such a fail-safe system however when the one of the primary functions of a data centre is duplicating files before distribution to any user.
4. Data Sovereignty and Compliance
Many industries are bound by strict compliance requirements and regulations. Whilst the question of where large data centres are based is beginning to be understood and grappled with, many are overlooking the question of data stored in the cache of users’ browser. Call it what you want, but if this is the way your document editor functions, you are operating a series of international data centres. With just a few clicks and the magic password ‘F12’, the browser will show the cached documents straight away.
Conclusion:
Governments or organisations that handle financial records, medical information, intellectual property, or indeed any other data, need to carefully assess whether their document editor is operating in a manner consistent with their own regulations and OWASP guidelines. The implications of sending full copies of documents to every browser are many, and extremely questionable. Genuine server-side policy enforcement is the only way to maintain real security. Collabora Online sends a pixel based view of a document to the end user, whilst the full document data remains safely under your control.
V4.1 General Access Control Design
4.1.1 Verify that the application enforces access control rules on a trusted service layer, especially if client-side access control is present and could be bypassed.
4.1.2 Verify that all user and data attributes and policy information used by access controls cannot be manipulated by end users unless specifically authorized.
4.1.3 Verify that the principle of least privilege exists – users should only be able to access functions, data files, URLs, controllers, services, and other resources, for which they possess specific authorization. This implies protection against spoofing and elevation of privilege. (C7)
4.1.4 [DELETED, DUPLICATE OF 4.1.3]
4.1.5 Verify that access controls fail securely including when an exception occurs.
Accessibility isn’t just a matter of compliance, it’s a commitment to fairness. When content is accessible, it becomes a bridge that connects people, regardless of their circumstances. For instance, individuals with visual impairments can have text read aloud to them through screen readers, while keyboard shortcuts enable those with mobility limitations to navigate without a mouse. Furthermore, it is our firm belief that improvements in document accessibility can be win for everyone, impaired or not.
As such, at Collabora Online we are committed to bringing the best digital experience we can to all our users, and with our latest release are one step closer to making inclusivity a reality for every individual, regardless of their abilities or challenges.
Screen Readers
One of the key features of document accessibility is that documents are readable by screen readers. Screen readers are software programs that read text aloud for people who are visually impaired. To make a document accessible to screen readers, it must be structured in a way that is readable by the software. This includes using headings, lists, and tables to organize the content in a logical and easy-to-understand way.
In order to further improve document readability, we have added an accessibility checker which will highlight areas that require improvement, both adding to a document’s structure and logical flow, as well as flagging specific issues for screen readers.
Additionally, we’ve introduced a new feature that allows screen readers to access menus and dialogs. This change will make it easier for those with visual impairments to navigate and interact with their documents through text-to-speech or braille displays. With our new initial screen reader support, we’re working to ensure that no one is left behind in a digital world.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Another important feature of document accessibility is that documents can be used with only a keyboard. Some users may not be able to use a mouse, so providing keyboard shortcuts and making sure that all controls and links can be accessed with keyboard commands is essential to ensure access for all.
The latest 23.05 release also brings an improvement to our previously existing keyboard shortcut interface, enhancing the user experience for all Collabora Online users.
Dark Mode
The introduction of Collabora Online’s Dark Mode UI isn’t just a stylistic choice, it’s another step towards enhancing visual accessibility and user comfort. Dark Mode has been carefully designed to alleviate eye strain and mitigate other visual accessibility issues that users may face. By reducing the overall brightness and minimising glare, Dark Mode creates a more soothing and comfortable environment for extended periods of document creation and collaboration. We plan to work on low contrast themes next.
Benefits for Everyone
Improving online accessibility is beneficial for everyone by providing a better, more logical and usable user experience. Documents with a clear structure that are easier for screen readers to understand, will also be more easily read by those who do not require screen readers. In the same way, clearer user interfaces, with intuitive shortcuts, will help everyone who is writing, editing, or reading a document. With this attitude in mind, we are very pleased with the latest improvements to Collabora Online, and are confident that as we seek to make Collabora Online more accessible to those with the biggest challenges, we are at the same time improving the experience of all.
Stay tuned over our next releases to see the continuous improvements in accessibility for all.
Upcoming talks by Collabora at the LibreOffice Conference 2023
The LibreOffice Conference 2023 will take place from September 20 to September 23 in Bucharest. We are glad to be able to sponsor this event and to contribute a significant number of talks on various aspects of LibreOffice technology. Here is a list of talks by our team to consider for your conference schedule. Please don’t forget to check back after the event. We will be sharing the links to the slides and videos of the conference talks as soon as they are available.
Browse talks by day
To make it easy to navigate through the timetable, we sorted the talks chronologically. Please find the complete schedule, including track topics and more filters, on the conference website!
21 September 23 12:00 – 12:30 EEST (UTC+3) 1 Room 1
Michael Meeks, Managing Director of Collabora Productivity, has a look at the latest developments in LibreOffice Technology from the perspective of the ecosystem.
Justin Luth: Using configuration extensions to automate preferred defaults
21 September 2023 15:30 – 16:00 EEST (UTC+3) Room 1
Justin Luth outlines the advantages and disadvantages, and showcases some simple examples and installation scrips on using configuration extensions to automate defaults.
21 September 2023 16:00 – 16:30 EEST (UTC+3) Room 1
As technology advances, documents will become larger and larger, and the original zip standard will no longer suffice, so Zip64 extensions have to be used in LibreOffice, to increase the limitations of zip.
Timur Gadžo: Tracking bugs in LibreOffice together …
21 September 2023 17:00 – 17:30 EEST (UTC+3) Room 2
There are different paths that help provide quality assurance. Some are done by devs, some in TDF, some by ecosystem partners. Many paths lead to Gerrit. Here we are showing some examples of how Collabora and its partners are helping fix bugs in LibreOffice Technology.
Justin Luth: Avoiding regressions by hunting in QA unit test
21 September 23 17:50 – 18:00 EEST (UTC+3) Room 2
Fixing bugs can be quite a challenge. Based on a complicated example, Justin Luth speaks about some lessons learned, shows how to avoid regressions. See details Save to calendar
Miklos Vajna: Multi-page floating tables in Writer
22 September 2023 09:00 – 09:30 EEST (UTC+3) Room 1
LibreOffice was capable of handling multi-page tables and floating tables in Writer already. But it was not possible to combine these two features to have a multi-page floating table, which is a frequently used feature in Word documents. Hear Miklos Vajna explain the challenges on implementing this functionality.
Mike Kaganski: LanguageTool integration improvements and some other fixes
22 September 2023 10:30 – 11:00 EEST (UTC+3) Room 1
In this talk, Mike Kaganski will describe some improvements & fixes he made to LibreOffice over the last year, including some recent changes to the native LanguageTool integration.
The document themes are a way to quickly, easily and consistently change the design of a document. Hear Tomaž “Quikee” Vajngerl talk on the possibility to add, change and preserve the themes of a document for Writer and Calc that is now available in LibreOffice 7.6.
Jaume Pujantell Traserra : PDF handling in LibreOffice
22 September 2023 15:30 – 16:00 EEST (UTC+3) Room 2
LibreOffice needs to handle PDFs in various contexts: from inserting them inside a document, to converting them to ODG format or showing them with the experimental PDFium API. Hears Jaume Trassera’s talk on the strengths and pitfalls in different situations.
Szymon Kłos: Improvements in JSDialogs – LibreOfficeKit API for UI components
22 September 2023 17:20 – 17:30 EEST (UTC+3) Room 1
JSDialogs is the framework for sharing UI components between LibreOffice and Collabora Online. Szymon Kłos explains their functionality and shows many of the optimizations and improvements it recently gained.
Justin Luth: Forms: keyboard navigation and VBA macro control
22 September 2023 17:40 – 17:45 EEST (UTC+3) Room 1
In this presentation, Justin Luth outlines the three different types of form controls available in LibreOffice and talks about newly gained keyboard navigation and VBA macro access to form controls.
22 September 2023 17:45 – 17:50 EEST (UTC+3) Room 1
Learn about the improvements made on view separation based on different view options in scenarios where there can be multiple users with different view options.
22 September 2023 17:50 – 17:55 EEST (UTC+3) Room 1
Hear Gökay Şatir‘s talk on the recently added support for language-specific shortcuts. When a document is being edited by multiple users, they can all use their languages’ shortcuts.
Mike Dworski: The 3 layers of typo Correction: AutoCorrect, spellchecking, and grammar checking
23 September 2023 09:30 – 10:00 EEST (UTC+3) Room 1
Were you ever frustrated by ducking AutoCorrect? Seeing red squiggles under misspelled words? Accidentally putting the wrong words inside your sentences? Learn how each layer tackles different types of errors, plus how to refine the dictionaries and tools that are already there!
Michael Meeks: An economic perspective on FLOSS & LibreOffice technology
23 September 2023 11:00 – 11:30 EEST (UTC+3) 1 Room 1
Hear Michael Meeks‘ talk and join the discussion around FLOSS business models as they related to LibreOffice technology, the ecosystem, and funding the future & success of LibreOffice.
Find out more about Collabora Office & Collabora Online
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 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 of Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, follow us on Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn and YouTube.
The new Collabora Office 23.05 brings more features, improved performance and increased interoperability
Cambridge, August 7, 2023 – We are happy to announce the new major release of Collabora Office 23.05.
Collabora Office, for Linux, Windows and Mac, is the enterprise version of the world’s most popular open-source office productivity suite, LibreOffice. It is the foundation for new versions of our online collaborative office, Collabora Online, and also powers our apps for iOS, Android and Chrome OS.
The enterprise office suite provides businesses and professionals a richly featured, secure document creation environment with Long-Term Support (LTS) and bespoke development services backed by decades of experience.
Collabora Office’s new release includes new features targeting three key areas: accessibility, interoperability and usability. Below you will find an overview of the exciting new features and improvements that are available in Collabora Office 23.05 and where you can download it.
Accessibility Features
Accessibility features are created to provide comfort to all users, for example, those who prefer to use just a keyboard, those who cannot see the screen very well or those who have impairments.
Dark Mode
Dark Mode has seen over 40 bug fixes and improvements and further support for switching between dark and light mode manually.
To toggle dark mode on and off:
Along the top navigation bar select: Tools → Options
Collabora Office → View → Appearance Mode: “System”, “Light”, “Dark”
Toggle between light and dark mode
Interoperability Features
For some time, users and organizations have faced a major challenge when trying to find an alternative to Microsoft’s widely-used productivity suite: the issue of file compatibility and interoperability. These improvements continue to build on our already solid base of excellent interoperability and are fully compatible across both the desktop and online versions of Collabora Office.
Document Themes
Document themes are predefined formatting settings that you can apply to a whole document to easily change and re-purpose its appearance, add your own branding and give it a consistent feel. They usually include a combination of specific colours and fonts for heading, subheadings and body text. When the formatting is changed within the theme, it will change across all parts of the document following that formatting.
Themes also allows the user to choose between multiple default looks of objects when inserting and changing, which are derived from the current theme.
To apply a document theme:
Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme’
Select the theme you’d like to apply
Press ‘Ok’
To create a document theme
Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme → Add’
From here you can define colours for each part of your document.
Change and customise your Document Theme via a dialog box
Multi-page Floating Tables in Writer
This new feature is a combination of two existing capabilities. Multi-page tables and floating tables. Multi-page tables are tables than span their content over more than one page. Floating tables are tables inside a floating frame. This allows you to wrap text around them, which is particularly useful for brochures. Previously, it was not possible to combine these two features.
Floating frames used to work only on a single page. Now you can create floating tables that span across multiple pages. It improves interoperability with Microsoft’s OOXML format. It also significantly improves interoperability with tables that have been accidentally floated by users in Microsoft Office – often by just adjusting table sizing and positioning. This is frequently a problem in mis-designed Government forms – where tables are used for rendering borders, these should render and be editable with this update.
If you are interested in the complex technical challenges behind this feature, we encourage you to take a look into the series of posts by developer Miklos Vajna. There’s also a very insightful talk presented at COOL Days 2023 on YouTube. This feature is is still under active development, with some minor issues on specific use-cases to be ironed out, but you can make use of it in Collabora Office 23.05 now.
Multi-page Floating Tables in Collabora Office 23.05
Compact View of Pivot Tables
Pivot Tables are a flexible and powerful analysis tool for mixed data sets. Collabora Office can create and import Pivot Tables. The feature had first been introduced to in early 2021 together with numerous statistical tools. Meanwhile, the feature has seen further interoperability improvements. Collabora Office Calc is now able to preserve the more recent default compact Pivot Tables created in Excel. In addition to the more accurate visual representation, this improvement also avoids incorrect cell references.
Multi-Stop Gradients
Exciting improvements have been made to the under-the-hood renderer! Our rendering engine has been enhanced and can now handle even more complex gradients. You can now turn up the visual appeal of your document by incorporating multi-stop gradients into shapes, borders, and other elements. This update is essential for anyone who works with intricate graphics – bringing improvements and better interoperability for existing documents and making it easier to edit more complex designs and graphics.
Improved Frame Anchoring and Position
Collabora Office 23.05 includes improved compatibility with older document-framing descriptions including better positioning for frame handling, better support for combining/splitting frames and overlapping frames, fixes to some cases where parent styles were ignored, and fixes to avoid UI anchor changes that caused movement on the page.
64-bit Zip Support
The Zip64 standard extends numerous internal limitations in the XLSX and ODS formats used to compress documents. While the old zip limitations are enough for most practical user cases, documents with enormous amounts of content embedded could occasionally run into such limits. With support for Zip64 included in 23.05, editing and working with huge spreadsheets is now possible in Collabora Office. Zip64 also serves as a replacement – replacing the older standard for smaller files.
Zip64 support makes for exciting news for all, whether you’re a pro handling massive documents or a casual user who will surely benefit from the interoperability improvements! Everyone can expect improvements across the board.
Usability
Keyboard Navigation through Forms
You can use the tab key to circularly navigate through content controls and fieldmarks. The modern content controls have a tabIndex field, which allows for precise ordering of keyboard navigation. The tabIndex also allows a control to be skipped – which is useful to avoid getting stuck in rich text controls (since the tab key needs to insert a tab character in that case). Form developers can specify the tabIndex via the content control properties UI.
Navigate easily through forms using the tab key
Page Number Wizard
A wizard dialogue box has been added, combining inserting the required headers, footers, and page number fields into a single, easy to use, familiar dialog for users. This features all the common alignment options, support for a variety of languages, and a preview.
Simply select ‘Insert → Page Number...’
and you will see a dialogue box appear which enables you to customise the positioning, alignment and style of page numbers, along with a preview. There are a variety of supported languages available.
To remove page numbers, simply delete the page number in one of the footers and it will remove the page numbers on all pages.
Insert page numbers with the new Page Number Wizard
Other New Features
New ‘plain text’, ‘combo box’ and titles and tags options in Content Controls.
Added support to open multi image TIFF files.
Auto fitting text scaling algorithm has been changed so it works similar to MS Office.
Categorized link targets when linking to a presentation.
Community
Collabora has invested significantly in bringing a host of new features and functionality to this latest release and contributes a vast majority of the Collabora Office code. However, we want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues in the wider LibreOffice community who helped to contribute not only to this, but also to the underlying LibreOffice Technology upon which Collabora Office, CODE and Collabora Online are built.
All of our code is open source and available to the public on GitHub. Join the Collabora Online Community, take part in easy hacks and discussions in the forum.
Here are some new features contributed by the LibreOffice community.
Typographical Editing
New optional hyphenation settings are available to give rules for adjusting text flow. You can now limit hyphenation within paragraphs, set a minimum word length for hyphenation and opt to not hyphenate the last word of a paragraph.
This work was done by László Németh, NISZ.
Typographical Editing Options
Change Tracking in Numbered Lists
When making changes within numbered lists, the numbering has now been fixed to show actual and original numbers within the document.
Example of new change tracking in numbered lists
Table Style Design Support
You can now modify table styles and create new ones in Impress and Draw. Modified styles are saved into documents, and can be shared via templates. You can access this function by right-clicking on a design in the Table Design Sidebar panel.
Collabora Productivity is a leading provider of innovative software solutions, catering to the needs of individuals and businesses worldwide. With a focus on usability, performance, and security, Collabora Office and Online empower users to accomplish their goals efficiently and effectively.
Collabora Office is the latest enterprise release of our desktop office suite based on LibreOffice Technology, for professional, mobile, and online use. Collabora Office 23.05 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 outstanding work done by so many that is included into Collabora Office 23.05. Our annual release, contains code that was contributed to LibreOffice 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6. For a deep dive on all details and credits, please do take a look at the release notes.
It’s easy to migrate to Collabora Office 23.05 or try Collabora Office 23.05 for yourself! Just head to the Collabora Office page and request your demo today, or download on the Windows or Mac App store.
If you would like to help test out the very latest Collabora Office versions before official release, you can download the development snapshots.
Cambridge, July 25, 2023 – We are happy to announce the new major release of Collabora Online 23.05.
Collabora Online provides businesses a richly featured, collaborative and secure document creation environment with dedicated support backed by decades of experience. This new release includes new features targeting three key areas: accessibility, interoperability and usability.
Collabora Online 23.05 introduces a sleeker and more intuitive user interface, designed to simplify and optimise the user experience. With a clean and modern look, navigating through various applications, accessing essential tools and accessing new features has never been easier.
Below you will find an overview of the exciting new features and improvements that are available in COOL 23.05 and where you can download it.
Accessibility Features
Accessibility features are created to provide comfort to all users, for example, those who prefer to use just a keyboard, those who cannot see the screen very well or those who have impairments.
Dark Mode and Custom View Settings
Per view settings, allows us to render views differently – including various options such as showing non-printing characters or spell checking underlines in different views, in addition to Dark Mode.
As anyone who’s worked on an important proposal late into the night will tell you, staring at a bright screen and concentration don’t often go hand in hand. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce Collabora Online’s Dark Mode.
Dark Mode
Keyboard Shortcuts
The majority of computer users will use keyboard shortcuts to speed up their work and minimise the need to switch between different input devices. Previously, when collaboratively editing a file in Collabora Online, the shortcut settings were set to the language of the first user.
Now, the keyboard shortcuts have been expanded to allow all users to be able to use their own language’s keyboard shortcuts when editing a file collaboratively.
Another improvement to using keyboard shortcuts is the ability to hold the ‘Alt’ key to highlight your shortcut options for learnability.
Javascript Dialogs
We understand the importance of making software accessible to everyone. That’s why we’ve introduced a new feature that allows screen readers to access menus and dialogs. We have moved the dialog rendering to the client-side as JSDialogs, and converted all of our vex library usage to JSDialogs too, to enable higher accessibility.
This change will make it easier for those with visual impairments to navigate and interact with their documents through text-to-speech or braille displays. These accessibility wins bring benefits for everyone: in our previous releases we had 3 dialog types with 3 different looks. Now we have introduced a more consistent look across the board using JSDialogs.
Initial Screen Reading Support
Designed to assist users with visual impairments, this feature unlocks a world of possibilities, ensuring the visually impaired can participate in online collaboration.
Our initial enablement works in tabbed view mode and allows Writer to read paragraphs from the document as they are navigated through. When a user types, the screen reader reads the entered content.
For selections, after selecting ‘Hello’, the screen reader will typically say: “Hello, selected”. In the same way, if text is deselected, the screen reader reports the state change: “Hello, unselected”. Screen reading is a complex area that is best tuned to an individual users’s needs, and NVDA provides a rich palette of functions that can be toggled on or off. Moreover there are specific shortcuts for explicitly asking the NVDA screen reader to read the focused paragraph, the current text selection and so on.
This initial screen reader support is currently only supported for tabbed mode. Screen reader support is not enabled by default, since it is a resource consuming feature. It can be turned on by toggling within the UI (Help → Accessibility Support) or modifying the coolwsd.xml configuration file. Search for the accessibility section in coolwsd.xml and set the enable item to true.
Interoperability Features
For some time, users and organizations have faced a major challenge when trying to find an alternative to Microsoft’s widely-used productivity suite: the issue of file compatibility and interoperability. These improvements continue to build on our already solid base of excellent interoperability.
Document Themes
Document themes are predefined formatting settings that you can apply to a whole document to easily change and re-purpose its appearance, add your own branding and give it a consistent feel. They usually include a combination of specific colours and fonts for heading, subheadings and body text. When the formatting is changed within the theme, it will change across all parts of the document following that formatting.
Themes also allows the user to choose between multiple default looks of objects when inserting and changing, which are derived from the current theme.
To apply a document theme:
Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme’
Select the theme you’d like to apply
Press ‘Ok’
To create a document theme
Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme → Add’
From here you can define colours for each part of your document.
Document Themes in Writer
Multi-page Floating Tables in Writer
This new feature is a combination of two existing capabilities. Multi-page tables and floating tables. Multi-page tables are tables than span their content over more than one page. Floating tables are tables inside a floating frame. This allows you to wrap text around them, which is particularly useful for brochures. Previously, it was not possible to combine these two features.
Floating frames used to work only on a single page. Now you can create floating tables that span across multiple pages. It improves interoperability with Microsoft’s OOXML format. It also significantly improves interoperability with tables that have been accidentally floated by users in Microsoft Office – often by just adjusting table sizing and positioning. This is frequently a problem in mis-designed Government forms – where tables are used for rendering borders, these should render and be editable with this update.
If you are interested in the complex technical challenges behind this feature, we encourage you to take a look into the series of posts by developer Miklos Vajna. There’s also a very insightful talk presented at COOL Days 2023 on YouTube. This feature is is still under active development, with some minor issues on specific use-cases to be ironed out, but you can make use of it in COOL 23.05 now.
Multi-page Floating Tables
Compact View of Pivot Tables
Pivot Tables are a flexible and powerful analysis tool for mixed data sets. Collabora Online can create and import Pivot Tables. The feature had first been introduced to Online in early 2021 together with numerous statistical tools. Meanwhile, the feature has seen further interoperability improvements. Collabora Online Calc is now able to preserve the more recent Excel default of compact Pivot Tables created in Excel. In addition to the more accurate visual representation, this improvement also avoids incorrect cell references.
Multi-Stop Gradients
Exciting improvements have been made to the under-the-hood renderer! Our rendering engine has been enhanced and can now handle even more complex gradients. You can now turn up the visual appeal of your document by incorporating multi-stop gradients into shapes, borders, and other elements. This update is essential for anyone who works with intricate graphics – bringing improvements and better interoperability for existing documents and making it easier to collaborate on more complex designs and graphics.
Improved Frame Anchoring and Position
COOL 23.05 includes improved compatibility with older document-framing descriptions including better positioning for frame handling, better support for combining/splitting frames and overlapping frames, fixes to some cases where parent styles were ignored, and fixes to avoid UI anchor changes that caused movement on the page.
64-bit Zip Support
The Zip64 standard extends numerous internal limitations in the XLSX and ODS formats used to compress documents. While the old zip limitations are enough for most practical user cases, documents with enormous amounts of content embedded could occasionally run into such limits. With support for Zip64 included in 23.05, editing and working with huge spreadsheets is now possible in Collabora Online. Zip64 also serves as a replacement – replacing the older standard for smaller files.
Zip64 support makes for exciting news for all, whether you’re a pro handling massive documents or a casual user who will surely benefit from the interoperability improvements! Everyone can expect improvements across the board.
Usability
Page Navigation
Page navigation plays a crucial role in enhancing the user experience, especially when creating large documents in Writer. It allows users to move seamlessly between sections, structure their documents and find the content they are searching for easily within complex documents.
The existing navigator functionality will now be viewable in the sidebar, allowing you to jump to each section by simply double clicking the headings. You can find this by clicking ‘View → Navigator’ and it will appear in the sidebar. From here you can jump to headings, tables, images, hyperlinks and more.
Navigating through Writer Documents
Simple Page Number Insertion
A wizard dialogue box has been added, combining inserting the required headers, footers, and page number fields into a single, easy to use, familiar dialog for users.
This features all the common alignment options, support for a variety of languages, and a preview.
Simply select ‘Insert → Page Numbers’ and you will see a dialogue box appear which enables you to customise the positioning, alignment and style of page numbers. There are a variety of supported languages available including Asian and Cyrillic styles.
To remove page numbers, simply delete the page number in one of the footers and it will remove the page numbers on all pages.
Simple Insertion of Page Numbers
Impress Hidden Slides
Impress introduces a new feature. Now a user can hide and show slides on the Slide Pane by right clicking and choosing ‘Hide Slide’ or ‘Show Slide’. They will then shown or hidden throughout the full screen presentation.
Show and Hide Slides in Impress
Core New Features Introduced in 22.05 Updates
Since the major release of COOL22.05 in June 2022, many new features have been introduced throughout the year. These have had extensive testing and are now officially core features of Collabora Online 23.05.
Improved Hyperlink Pop-ups
The Collabora Online UI sees constant updates, improving the experience based on user feedback. One of the obvious changes can be seen in the way hyperlinks are handled in documents. Now, when clicking on a hyperlink, a small pop-up dialog appears, allowing several options. You can click the URL to follow the link (a pop-up will warn you, if you are leaving for an external page), you can copy the link, edit or delete it. The new and improved hyperlink pop-ups are available for all modules of Collabora Online and do significantly improve the handling of links – especially inside spreadsheets.
Improved Hyperlink Editing
In Nextcloud, you can also see a small link preview of the URL which can help when searching through links.
Image Preview of Hyperlinks
Reference Management and Bibliographic Data with Zotero
Zotero is an open-source reference management software allowing users to manage bibliographic data and related research materials. It allows users to share bibliography libraries and notes, choosing from different citation styles. Collabora Online can now browse all the existing records of one’s Zotero library, enabling users to insert, remove, and refresh references, citations, and notes or to automatically generate bibliographies. This makes Collabora Online an excellent solution for research and academia alike.
Users will need to enter a valid Zotero API key into their office settings, if you don’t see a setting there – why not encourage your integrator to add it: it should be easy. More details on the Zotero plug-in are available on our blog. We hope to see more Collabora Online integrators making this feature available soon.
Add Citations with Zotero
AI Based Translations with DeepL
DeepL is a leading AI company based in Germany. It offers the DeepL Translator, a translation tool based on a machine learning model that is trained by a large team of linguists. The plug-in is connected to the DeepL API and makes these high-quality translations available directly in Collabora Online without having to leave the document you are working on. To make use of it, it will need to be configured inside coolwsd.xml. Find out more about it on our blog or in the Collabora Online SDK. Once the feature is enabled, translating text inside a Writer document is as easy as selecting it, clicking the “Translate” button and choosing the target language from dialog.
Translations Using DeepL
PDF & EPUB Export Options
Previously PDF was from exported with default settings from Writer. Now we have a tabbed dialog full of options, including accessibility, permissions, image quality and more. Similarly to PDF export, we enabled the EPUB export options dialog in Collabora Online. EPUB is the most widely supported vendor-independent XML-based e-book format.
Community
Collabora has invested significantly in bringing a host of new features and functionality to this latest release and contributes a vast majority of the Collabora Online code. However, we want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues in the wider LibreOffice community who helped to contribute not only to this, but also to the underlying LibreOffice Technology upon which CODE and Collabora Online are built.
All of our code is open source and available to the public on GitHub. Join the Collabora Online Community, take part in easy hacks and discussions in the forum.
Typographical Editing
New optional hyphenation settings are available to give rules for adjusting text flow. You can now limit hyphenation within paragraphs, set a minimum word length for hyphenation and opt to not hyphenate the last word of a paragraph.
You can now modify table styles and create new ones in Impress and Draw. Modified styles are saved into documents, and can be shared via templates. You can access this function by right-clicking on a design in the Table Design Sidebar panel.
Collabora Productivity is a leading provider of innovative software solutions, catering to the needs of individuals and businesses worldwide. With a focus on usability, performance, and security, Collabora Online empowers users to accomplish their goals efficiently and effectively.
Collabora Online 23.05 is the latest enterprise release of our widely integrated, secure office suite. It is suitable for large-scale deployment and comes with SLA, enterprise support with signed security updates and the ability to help direct our development priorities. Collabora Online integrates flawlessly into Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, and many other major file sync & share, groupware and hosting solutions. It’s ideal for organisations that want to collaborate on documents, without losing control of them or compromising on privacy. With the ability to host COOL on your own hardware or integrate it into a trusted environment, Collabora Online is the ideal online office suite for digital sovereignty and GDPR compliance. Enterprises interested in using Collabora Online can check out our Partner’s integrations and try an online demo. Hosting and Cloud businesses that wish to add Collabora Online to their product portfolio can become a partner.
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1 Room 1
