Thank you for an exciting 2021!

Looking at what we have achieved together 🤝

At the end of the year, we like to look back at what we have achieved as a team – in cooperation with our worldwide network of partners and the community. The year 2021 was again dominated by the global pandemic. While it had little impact on our work processes, it meant that personal encounters remained very rare.

At the same time, we launched the first COOL Days, a new event that brings together people interested in Collabora Online and LibreOffice technology. Collabora Online, Collabora Office and our mobile apps have all seen major performance improvements and increased functionality this year. At the end of the year, we released CODE 21.11, which previews what our flagship enterprise product, due out in early 2022, will look like. Thank you, for your support this year. See what we have achieved together this year. 💜

🆕 Collabora Online includes new functionalities and better performance 💻

This year Collabora Online has undergone a number of important updates. In addition to interoperability and user experience, there was a strong focus on performance enhancements. Many ground-breaking new functionalities already celebrated their premiere in the 6.4 release branch. With the release of CODE 21.11, more new implementations from the desktop were added.

Collabora Online 6.4 adds ground-breaking features

Pivot Tables in Collabora Online 6.4.x
Select & run macros in Collabora Online 6.4.7
Anchors in Collabora Online 6.4.10
Anchors in Collabora Online 6.4.10

 

⚡️ Powerful new features arrive for Collabora Office on the desktop 🖥️

Collabora Office 21.06 brings enhanced productivity and smooth migration

June 2021 saw the major release of our desktop product Collabora Office. This release brought many UX improvements and smoother document interchange. Collabora Office 21.06 was focused on performance and making migration simpler for organizations. This release introduced a new numbering system, based on the year and month of its release, and many powerful features like a style inspector, better access for extensions and improved PPTX filters and many more.

Improved PPTX import in Collabora Office 21.06
Powerful new Style Inspector tool in the Sidebar of Collabora Office 21.06
Collabora Office 21.06 makes it easier and more convenient to find and install extensions

Collabora Office 6.4 saw many updates and improvements

  • April, version 6.4-33: Printed publications can now make use of Gutter Margins and PPTX import improvements for shaped bitmaps arrive
  • May, version 6.4-39: Improvements on XML import have been implemented
Add Gutter Margins to text documents in Collabora Office 6.4-33
True to the original PPTX import if shaped bitmaps in Collabora Office 6.4-33

🧰 CODE 21.11 provides insights into the upcoming enterprise version 📄

CODE 21.11 is the herald of our new enterprise version to be released next year. The current development edition introduces the full range of new features and performance enhancements for testing. Among other things, it contains the new native sidebar, improved interoperability and a number of new effects for objects such as glow, soft edges or blurry shadows. The numerous performance improvements include asynchronous save, JavaScipt acceleration, more efficient network traffic, and improved multi-user editing. Learn more details in our announcement.

New “native” Sidebar in CODE 21.11
CODE 21.11 includes a new “native” Sidebar
Apply glow and soft edge effects to objects in CODE 21.11
Improved PPTX import/export filters in CODE 21.11

🆕 Many new features for Collabora Office for Android, iOS & Chrome OS📱

Large, user-friendly UI on tablets
CSV Import in Collabora Office on Android
Moving Sheets in Collabora Office on Android
Smart connectors in presentation in Collabora Office on Android
VBA macros in Collabora Office for Android

 

🏠 Small scale work-from-home-solution and ARM64 support 👨‍💼

In March, together with our partners at Ubuntu and Nextcloud, we introduced a work-from-home solution for the Raspberry Pi including the easy-to-use Collabora Online built-in server. In April, we announced that CODE now also officially supports the ARM64 platform.

Canonical, Nextcloud and Collabora deliver work-from-home solution to Raspberry Pi

📰 Amazing news, interesting figures 📈

Over 250 partners worldwide

In 2021, our large network of amazing partners kept growing. We can now rely on over 200 partners from more than 50 countries. We help each other to promote open source, privacy & digital sovereign solutions and re-invest the proceeds into creating great new software. Find a Collabora partner in a special field or area! Or become a partner yourself!

 

CollaboraOffice.com available in four new languages

We continued dedicating a lot of effort to make our website and the information about our products easily available to a larger set of people. This year we implemented translations in Simplified Chinese , Japanese 🇯🇵, Russian 🇷🇺 and Czech 🇨🇿 to the available options on collaboraoffice.com. Thanks a lot to the translators. Also, the community translating Collabora Online kept growing. Would you like to help to translate our software to your language? Join our translation team on Weblate!

collaboraoffice.com is available in new languages, including japanese.

 

Collabora’s Contributions to LibreOffice 7.1 and 7.2

Collabora is part of the ecosystem developing and advancing LibreOffice Technology. Our developers responsible for many commits to the LibreOffice core. Many of the new features in LibreOffice 7.1 and LibreOffice 7.2 like Smart Art improvements, blurry shadows for objects, gutter margins or the possibility to add visible digital signatures to existing PDF files have been implemented by Collaborans. Find more details of our 7.1 contributions in our blog.

PDF signing improvements by Collabora in LibreOffice 7.1

 

Updated LibreOffice growth infographic 2021 📈

We updated the popular LibreOffice growth infographic. Despite the challenges posed by the global pandemic, the statistics around LibreOffice collaboration are impressive. Over 210M active LibreOffice users, over 70M pulls from the CODE Docker image, 500K installs of the Collabora Office mobile apps, and more than 12K code commits from the community and the ecosystem to the LibreOffice code. Have a look at the numbers!

 

🎙️ Together at a distance – a year of online conferences 👏

The major events – foremost the large international conferences – had to take place online due to the global pandemic. Nevertheless, also new events emerged. We were part of the Open Source Day for Enterprises in Russia. For the first time, Collabora hosted the COOL Days, a virtual conference completely focused on Collabora Online. While most conferences took place online, there have also been a few opportunities to meet in person. For instance, in France, at the Open Source Experience and on at the it-sa fair in Nuremberg and some smaller German events like digital + souverän.

A fresh breeze on the calendar – COOL Days 2021

This year we hosted the COOL Days for the first time. A two-day online event that focused exclusively on topics related to Collabora Online. The first day, the Developer Day, focused on technical topics. The second day, the Business Day, dealt with questions of marketing and digital sovereignty. The schedule is available on our website, the videos from the Developer Day can be found in our playlist on YouTube.

FOSDEM 2021 went online

Europe’s largest open-source event had to take place as an online this year. However, this did not stop our team and the open-source community from presenting themselves and their latest developments. Collabora was present with a whole series of talk covering Collabora Online and LibreOffice technology. Find the videos of our FOSDEM 2021 talks and more slides available for download in our blog.

 

“Collabora Online for your documents” by Michael Meeks. Download the presentation!
“How Collabora Online development improves LibreOffice” by Jan “Kendy” Holešovský. Download the presentation!
“Porting LibreOffice to macOS on Apple Silicon” by Tor Lillqvist. Download the presentation!

Collaborans contributing strongly to the LibreOffice conference

In contrast to last year’s joint conference, this year’s LibreOffice conference was hosted solely by The Document Foundation. The Collabora team presented 12 talks this year. All links to the videos and the slides for download can be found in our blog.

Download “Collabora Keynote” by Michael Meeks
Download “PDF and other graphic improvements” by Tomaž Vajngerl
Download “JSDialogs improvements over the past year” by Szymon Kłos

 

💪 A welcoming and vibrant COOL community 🤝

More than a year after moving the work on Collabora Online out of the TDF infrastructure and onto GitHub, we can say that it was a good decision. We have lowered the barriers to participation while increasing the transparency of the project. New, active members have been found, keeping in touch via the Telegram channel, and supporting the work on CODE and Collabora Online. Once a week, always on Thursdays, the community meets for a call.

Users can now easily file issues on GitHub, and the community answers questions from home users in the forum. The minutes of the community meetings can also be found there. Another great way to get involved is to help translate. At the same time, we are happy to be an important ecosystem partner of the LibreOffice community helping to advance LibreOffice Technology.

 

Showcasing our Consultancy work 💻

Our developers have a superb expertise in LibreOffice technology and implement new features and enhancements. This year, we did set up a page showcasing some of those implementations we realized on our client’s request – to the benefit of everyone. Find out more!

 

Presenting the benefits of Collabora Online for educational institutions 👩‍🎓

Scalable, reliable, privacy respecting and secure! Collabora Online is an ideal solution for modern learning environments. We have put together a web page with the many benefits of Collabora Online in educational institutions. Learn more!

 

The Collabora Online SDK ⚙️

Collabora Online SDK describes the main methods that allow you to interact with different Collabora Online components. Find installation guides, frequently asked questions, Post Message API and documentation on exiting integrations and on how to create new ones on our new SDK pages.

Google Summer of Code 2021 ☀️

This year, the Collabora team again provided mentors for LibreOffice projects within the Google Summer of Code. Among the topics mentored were interesting implementations such as the VCL graphics backend, the text style deck and revisions to the SVM format. Detailed information on these and other projects can be found in our GSoC 21 article.

News by Collabora directly into your inbox 📨

This year, we have updated our public newsletter. We made it visually more appealing and lowered the frequency of the mail outs. If you would like to receive regular updates like this one on the news on Collabora Online, Collabora Office and the COOL Days please sign up to our newsletter, that is mailed approximately 6 to 8 times per year.

Tip: keep an eye on our new releases for more new features.

 

Summary

It has been a very busy year here at Collabora Productivity. We enjoy seeing the Collabora Online Community grow and keep on advancing our mission to make open-source rock. We continued giving users privacy and businesses control over their data. We managed to achieve excellent results, and had a good time working on them – despite the challenging conditions that 2021 persisted. The first edition of the COOL Days was a real highlight for us. We have big plans for 2021, and hope there will be more possibilities to meet in person on conferences and on events. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, if you’d like to partner with us, or to buy from us. Thank you for the great support this year. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thank You!

Collabora contributes help to make LibreOffice 7.1 great

The latest version of LibreOffice brings a range of enhancements. Many of the improvements are the result of the work of Collabora developers. We show you a selection of these contributions below, but for a complete overview and full community credits you can checkout the LibreOffice Release Notes.

 

More attractive Objects with new Blurry Shadows

Shadows used to be rendered as solid copies of objects. The new Blur option adds more realistic shadows to objects. The feature is available through the Shadows tab in the Area dialog or directly through the Sidebar. This feature was developed during a GSoC20 project by Ahmad Ganzouri mentored by the Collaborans Tomaž Vajngerl and Miklos Vajna. Several refinements were implemented by Collabora later on.

 

Business Ready and Online!

Collabora loves LibreOffice and is glad to be a major contributor to the LibreOffice ecosystem. Of course we offer business ready versions for the desktop – Collabora Office – with LTS and SLA serving your business needs, also to retain control over your ICT.
And for online collaboration, we are leading the development of Collabora Online – built on top of LibreOffice. Get more info or a demo.

Further significant SmartArt improvements

Collabora is constantly adding improvements to the import of SmartArt objects from PPTX. Some of these were already present in Collabora Office 6.4 and also in Collabora Online 6.4. The latest developments by Miklos Vajna are now implemented in LibreOffice 7.1. Find all the technical details in Miklos’ last corresponding blog entry and the one before that.

 

Much faster Find & Replace

Many of Collabora’s contributions are aimed at enhancing the performance of LibreOffice and Collabora Office. Often this streamlining is the work of Collaboran Noel Grandin. For this release, it has resulted in a 50 percent performance improvement in the Find & Replace function of Writer. Performance improvements in Calc include spell checking, by Dennis Francis, and Autofilter, by Luboš Luňák and Eike Rathke of Red Hat.

 

Add visible digital signatures to existing PDF files

It is now possible to add visible digital signatures to existing PDF files. Earlier, this had been limited to invisible signatures. We first introduced this feature with the release of Collabora Office 6.4. Find all the technical details for this implementation in Miklos Vajna’s development blog.

 

NotebookBar now shows preview of Styles

Another new feature, that makes working with styles easier, is the Styles Preview widget that has been added to the NotebookBar. Nice work by our colleague Szymon Kłos.

 

Many more Contributions

LibreOffice 7.1 includes many more contributions by Collabora. For example: Writer now supports anchoring shapes relative to the bottom of the page; an issue in the formula input box which had occurred in Calc during the freezing of rows/columns was resolved; templates in Writer are now locale-independent; handling of cached field results in Writer has been improved. We would like to say: a big thanks to all our partners and customers helping us to make this work possible! Find out more about all the new features and improvements in the LibreOffice 7.1 Release Notes.

 

Discover Collabora Office

Collabora Office is the LibreOffice-technology based suite for professional, mobile, and online use. Collabora Office provides businesses and professionals with the best features, interoperability, LTS and L3 support. Collabora is privileged to work with so many great contributors to the LibreOffice project and appreciates all the amazing work done by so many that is also included into Collabora Office. You can test the latest version of Collabora Office yourself! Just head to the Collabora Office page and request your demo today, or just click the button below.

 

Try the Collabora Office Demo

Collabora Online 6.4.4 – making presentations more beautiful with shadowed tables

Collabora Online 6.4.4 is adding the handling of shadows for tables in Impress

Besides various performance improvements, Collabora Online 6.4.4 also brings a few new features. You can now add shadows to the tables in Impress, enhancing your presentations and also improving the interoperability with Microsoft PowerPoint documents. Furthermore, Collabora Online now supports the latest ODF 1.3 format and all its improvements. Have a look at the 6.4 release notes for a detailed overview of this important update.

How to add shadows to tables in Impress

When a table is selected, you can access the new feature through the Tables Properties button on the Tables tab – or in the menu Table for the Classic Toolbar. Inside that dialog choose the Shadows tab and mark the Use Shadows checkbox to activate the feature.

The shadow option is available through Table Properties in the Tables tab

 

To customize the appearance of the shadow, you can:

  • specify the direction,
  • choose a colour from the various palettes the colour picker,
  • set the distance from the object,
  • and define the percentage of the transparency of the shadow.

 

 

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 .

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 .

 

Important new spreadsheet features and many other improvements in Collabora Online 6.4.3

Pivot Tables, Managing Names and Statistical Tools – new in Collabora Online 6.4.3

Version 6.4.3 brings powerful features to Calc online. You can now insert or edit Pivot Tables, and can now Define and Manage Names and use new Statistical Tools in spreadsheets. AutoFilter works more smoothly as well. Writer gains the ability to Insert Bookmarks and Reference Fields and there are many improvements to make Collabora Online better looking, easier to use and to offer more functionality. The full overview is in the release notes page.

Using Pivot Tables in Collabora Online

Pivot Tables are a flexible and powerful analysis tool for mixed data sets. The Pivot Table icon on the Data tab starts the wizard to create a Pivot Table in three steps. Editing the lay out of an existing Pivot Table, can be started with the same button. To create a new Pivot Table, do the following:

    1. Select the source (use the current selection or define one)
    2. Define the layout by dragging the available fields to the desired part of the Pivot Table
    3. Make final adjustments like defining the destination (new tab, or a position on the current one) of the Pivot Table and other options.

 

Select the data source for the Pivot Table
Step 1: Select the data source for the Pivot Table
Defining a Pivot Table layout in Collabora Online
Step 2: Drag and drop the available fields to define the layout of the Pivot Table
Pivot Table wizard in Collabora Online
Step 3: Make final (optinal) adjustments, like e. g. destination of the Pivot Table
Filtering data and adjusting the finest details to get the perfect result, with a rich set of sub-dialogs familiar from the desktop!

 

Defining and managing Range Names in Calc Online

Define Names allows you to specify easy to use names for selected areas. Access this function via the Data tab in Calc (or the Insert tab in later versions). Once one or more ranges are defined, they can be managed through the Manage Names function. While calculation in Online always used these names, the ability to manage them online is very convenient.

Defining range names in Collabora Online
Manage range names in Collabora Online
Mind that via the Options in Define Names, you can also define a Print Range. Print ranges are essential to configure and print useful PDF documents from a spreadsheet focused on the areas of greatest interest. Another great win in this new Collabora Online version!

 

 New look of AutoFilter in Collabora Online

The AutoFilter feature has been redesigned and is now using natively themed dialogs. It generates a rich combo box on the data columns of a range, that allows you select the data to be displayed and as well start the dialog for the even more flexible Standard Filter dialog.

 

Statistical tools for data analysis

Calc offers more than a dozen powerful statistical tools. Those are now available in Collabora Online via tab Data, tab. For statistical analysis you can access:

  • Sampling
  • Descriptive Statistics
  • Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)
  • Correlation
  • Covariance
  • Exponential Smoothing
  • Moving Average
  • Regression
  • Paired t-test
  • F-test
  • Z-test
  • Chi-square Test

A more detailed description about the statistical tools is available in the Collabora Online documentation. The Fourier Analysis can also be found inside the Statistics menu.

 

Improved document jail performance

Then there is an important improvement in performance for some users in Collabora Online 6.4.3. The details are rather technical. Collabora Online isolates each document into a secure jail. This is done by falling back through a series of options to ensure performance and security. The fastest approach (tried first) is bind-mounting, after which Collabora Online tries to use capabilities like cap_fowner to hard-link system files in. Unfortunately, in the 6.4.x series an intersection with systemd namespaces crippled this hard-linking optimization. In 6.4.3 this is now solved by copying files out of the system to a place that can safely and quickly hard-linked so then they can be shared. This is far faster than the ultimate fallback: raw copying of the data. The developers further accelerated the raw copying case by avoiding copying dictionaries too. For some systems this should give a significant performance win for document thumbnailing and load times, we also warn when hitting this slowest code-path too.

 

More new features in Collabora Online 6.4.3

Collabora Online is in permanent development, steadily introducing safe new features into our stable releases and constantly improving interoperability and user experience. Please check-out our release notes to find out about the latest features and improvements. Would you like to test the latest version with all new features? Then simply request a free demo!

 

 

How to access the new features in the classic UI

The new icons are only available in the new NotebookBar UI. However, if you are using the classic UI you will also be able to access the Pivot Table, AutoFilter, Define Name & Manage Names via the Data tab. On mouseover, a dropdown menu will give you access to the features.

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 .