CODE 21.11 RC2 – you can learn and test the new features already now
CODE 21.11 is the herald of the next major Collabora Online release. The free developer version – the final release is expected already within a week – includes all features and enhancements that will be available in our enterprise version. This release candidate allows everyone to learn more about new features already now. As always, your feedback on possible issues is much appreciated!
Beautiful and responsive new Sidebar, enhanced performance, improved interoperability, easier to use UI
With the upcoming release, a long list of new features and improvements will be made available. To mention a few:
The new “native” sidebar is drawn directly in the browsers by JavaScript, and not constructed on the server. It uses JSON files and is always beautiful and responsive. A major improvement for all users;
Performance improvements in many areas;
New “Full Screen” and other zoom buttons are available inside the “Layout” tab inside the NotebookBar;
Optimized AutoFilter searching for large numbers of unique records;
Improved PPTX import of grey-scaled & mirrored shaped images;
and many, many more…
CODE 21.11: Fast & responsive “native” Sidebar
About CODE
CODE is the Collabora Online Development Edition. It contains the latest developments and is perfect for home users. It enables them to regain control of their own online documents and to host them themselves in a secure and private environment. For tech-enthusiasts, it is a low-threshold way to get involved and familiar with our online office solution. CODE will be improved continuously and our next supported and maintained Collabora Online product will be built from it. The code is available on GitHub.
The final release and Collabora Online 21.11 are expected in the next weeks.
Those come with full information and with the credits we really love to make to all people in the Collabora Online community and also those in the LibreOffice community making these release possible.
The latest Collabora Office release, which is based on the LibreOffice technology core, brings many new features to your Android-based phones and tablets, as well as to Chromebooks and iOS. It offers better speed and comes with a range of user interface improvements. Among the new features are the editing of fontworks, CSV import and the ability to open PDF documents on mobile devices. Many of the improvements had already arrived on iOS with the recent 6.4.12 update, but this latest release of Collabora Office on Mobile further empowers you to maintain control of your documents, no matter where you are!
Talking about the latest release, Nicolas Christener, CEO at Adfinis, commented, “Collabora Office on Mobile is a real alternative to proprietary office editors on Android, iOS and Chrome. Our work with Collabora has delivered some specific customer benefits, such as the much improved tablet sidebar and user experience, and we’re pleased to support this ongoing product enhancement.”
“Collabora Office on Mobile is ideal for enterprise users wanting to edit their documents on the go using their phones or tablets. It’s great to work with Adfinis, and other partners, who understand the importance of digital sovereignty and have helped to make this a reality,” said, Michael Meeks, General Manager of Collabora Productivity.
Collabora Office 6.4.13 for mobile adds the ability to open CSV files in a spreadsheet. When opening a CSV file in Collabora, the dialog with the import settings, such as the character set, language, starting row, and separator, are shown. The dialog will also display a preview of the imported values before you tap ‘OK’ to import a file in Calc.
VBA compatible macros on mobile
Macros extend the functionality by automating tasks in Collabora Office. Run them now on your mobile application.
Move sheets and freeze rows or columns
Two very convenient features for working with spreadsheets arrived on Android. Use the tabs to access a dialog allowing you to move or copy the selected sheet. Also, the possibility to freeze panes or rows is now available on your mobile devices via the Sheet dialog.
Fontwork text art on mobile devices
Fontwork objects are fun to work with and a good way to add visual highlights to your documents. You can now add and edit them on your mobile device. The new feature is available in the Insert dialog.
Connector tool and glue points
The connector tool is a very handy feature to visualise relations in presentation, drawing with for example organisational charts. The new glue points can be attached to the junctures of any objects. The glue points will appear automatically when a connector is selected.
Style preview on tablets & Chromebooks
All the above features are available on phones, tablets, and Chromebooks alike. However, there is more to be discovered using the bigger screens. Tablets and Chromebooks do feature the new Style Preview widget found on the NotebookBar, making it easier to recognise and select Styles in all your text documents, such as open document format (ODT) and Microsoft OOXML DOCX.
Improved context menus for tabs in spreadsheets
The context menus of the tabs in spreadsheets have been revised. They now react flexibly and display the appropriate options in each case. For example, if only a single or several tabs are available in the spreadsheet.
Largest set of features and best performance
There are also important aspects to our mobile apps which you can’t see with your naked eye, but which noticeably improve your workflow with documents. Over the last few months, we have focused heavily on maximising the performance of our flagship product, Collabora Online, streamlining code and optimising processes in a number of places. Many of these improvements have been incorporated into Collabora Office 6.4.13 for Android and Chrome OS, and the earlier released 6.4.12 version for iOS. The current release is our mobile office suite with the largest set of features, and is at the same time the best performing.
Download Collabora Office 6.4.13
Collabora Office for iOS, Android and Chrome OS is available through the Play Store and App Store. We also provide the latest snapshot .apk for Android for download! The iOS version had recently been updated to version 6.4.12 and will see additional fixes soon. A vibrant and welcoming community has evolved around Collabora Online & Collbaora Office. If you would like to get in touch or get involved, visit us in the forum or on GitHub.
Collabora Office for Mobile devices is built on LibreOffice Technology
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, specialising in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit www.collaboraoffice.com or follow Collabora Office on Twitter .
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.
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 .
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.
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 .
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:
Select the source (use the current selection or define one)
Define the layout by dragging the available fields to the desired part of the Pivot Table
Make final adjustments like defining the destination (new tab, or a position on the current one) of the Pivot Table and other options.
Step 1: Select the data source for the Pivot Table
Step 2: Drag and drop the available fields to define the layout of the Pivot Table
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:
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!
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 .
