Tag: CODE 22.05

Thank you for a great 2023!

Naomi Obbard Leave a comment

Thank You for Everything We Achieved Together in 2023 🤝

At the end of the year, we like to look back at what we have achieved as a team alongside our worldwide network of partners and the community. 2023 was a particularly significant year for us as we celebrated ten years of Collabora Productivity, adding another productive decade to our mission of bringing document editing and trillions of existing documents into the free world!

 

 

In March we held another successful COOL Days conference, this time in Cambridge, which brought together our team, partners and the community. We are looking forward to another great event in April 2024 – join us!

As well as our own events, our team also attended over ten locations to present talks, meet partners and share Collabora Online with the wider community. You can keep up to date with our adventures on our events page.

2023 saw many organisations and users throwing off their proprietary shackles, and embracing the freedom open-source solutions bring. In particular, we saw many educational institutions reconsidering their relationship with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace amid privacy concerns, great strides being taken by local and national governments such as the openDesk project in Germany, and increasing numbers of private companies taking back control of their document storage and editing needs.

Collabora Online, Collabora Office and our mobile apps have all seen performance improvements and increased functionality. In July, we released the new major release of our flagship product Collabora Online 23.05, which included increased interoperability, performance boosts and a whole range of new features and accessibility improvements. Thank you for your support! Let’s take a deeper dive into what we have achieved together this year. 💜

 

Collabora Online 22.05 → 23.05

Our flagship product, Collabora Online saw marked improvements in 2023, introducing many exciting new features and a big focus on accessibility, working to bring the best digital experience we can to all our users, regardless of their abilities or challenges.

  • February 2023: Zotero plug in, PDF and EPUB export options, insert page number dialog, Duden Corrector plugin, easy hyperlink pop up editor
  • March 2023: linking API, improved conditional formatting from XLSX files.
  • April 2023: interoperability improvements.
  • July 2023: major release 23.05 introducing dark mode, expanded keyboard shortcuts, initial screen reading support, document themes, multi-page floating tables and accessibility improvements.
  • August 2023: further updates to keyboard shortcuts and more performance improvements.
  • September 2023: new font previews and barcode/QR code functionality.
  • October & November 2023: a focus on polishing and bug fixing with over 70 improvements.
  • December 2023: STYLEREF, floating tables properties, re-designed PostMessage for integrators and developers.

See the full release notes for Collabora Online 23.05 and COOL 22.05.

 

CODE: Developing a Rock-Solid Enterprise Version 💪

The latest major release of the Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) 23.05 was released in June. CODE always appears in advance of the corresponding version of Collabora Online – the Development Edition contains all new features which are extensively tested before becoming available in the Enterprise version (COOL). An overview of CODE releases for 2023 can be found in the release notes but will mostly mirror those of Collabora Online. You can find the conversations about CODE on social media, by searching for the hashtag #cool_dev on Mastodon or Twitter.

 

Powerful New Features for Collabora Office on the Desktop 🖥️

August 2023 saw the latest major release of Collabora Office, our long term supported desktop Office Suite for Windows, macOS, and Linux. This release brought a number of powerful productivity features focusing on accessibility and improving user experience. The new features contain code that was contributed to LibreOffice 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6. Collabora Office for Windows is available through the Microsoft Store. The latest version for macOS can be bought from the App Store. We also appreciate those who help us test the latest features inside our unstable snapshots.

  • August 2023: major release of Collabora Office 23.05 including dark mode, interoperability features, document themes, 64-bit zip support, advanced editing features for tables and forms and so much more!
  • September 2023: MS Office interoperability improvements including further support of document themes, floating tables and pivot tables.
  • December 2023: Collabora Office 23.05.6 – STYLEREF, floating tables properties and advanced header and footer functionality.

Buy for Windows

Try the Demo

Buy for macOS

 

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

Our major release for mobile and tablet devices in September 2023 brought more of the functionality from Collabora Online into the pockets of our users, as well as improving the current user experience and making navigating on smaller screens easier. Now you can use dark mode, improved form controls in Writer, Sparklines, consistent dialogs and a better UX for users on smaller screened devices.

 

Events 🗓️

COOL Days 2023 took place in Cambridge, with more than 50 participants joining from our team, partners and the community. We presented 45 lightning talks showcasing our talented developers’ work across the year, held workshops and discussions with our partners about the importance of data protection in Europe, shared our development roadmap, and further discussed how to mutually support our sales and marketing efforts as part of our partnership. The community dived into a LibreOffice Hackfest and of course we had a great time socialising and team building around historic Cambridge.

 

 

 

As well as our own annual conference, our team attended events across Europe presenting talks, meeting partners and sharing Collabora Online, as well as presenting a keynote at the LibreOffice Conference for Latin America in Mexico.

2023 Events

 

Date Event Location Links
17th – 18th January 2023 Univention Summit Bremen, Germany Blog
4th – 5th February 2023 FOSDEM Brussels, Belgium Blog & Talks
6th – 8th March 2023 CS3 Barcelona, Spain Talk Recording
28th – 29th March 2023 COOL Days Cambridge, UK Blog, Live Stream
16th – 17th September 2023 Nextcloud Conference Berlin, Germany Blog & Talks
20th – 23rd September 2023 LibreOffice Conference Bucharest, Romania Blog & Talks
28th – 29th September 2023 SeaDays Mainz, Germany Talk
7th – 9th November 2023 Smart Country Convention Berlin, Germany openDesk Blog
9th – 10th November 2023 LibreOffice Congreso Latin America Mexico City, Mexico Keynote
6th – 7th December 2023 Open Source Experience Paris, France Talk Slides

 

LibreOffice Community & Contributions to 7.5 and 7.6

Collabora Productivity is part of the ecosystem developing and advancing LibreOffice technology. We are the largest contributor to the LibreOffice codebase, with our developers contributing many commits to the LibreOffice core.

LibreOffice 7.5 and LibreOffice 7.6 saw many improvements from the team at Collabora – here is just a snapshot of some of the commits this year.

  • Content controls – added plain text type, combo box, PDF export, titles and tags. (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
  • Impress now supports cropped video for media shapes. blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
  • Citation handling: added plumbing in Writer to build Zotero-like functionality. blog post (Miklos Vajna, Collabora)
  • Keyboard navigation through forms (Justin Luth, Collabora)
  • Replacing strings with numbers in Calc tdf#126109 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
  • Find and replace in very large Calc sheets tdf#150749 (Noel Grandin, Collabora)
  • Added page number wizard in Insert menu for easy one-step insertion of the page number in the header/footer tdf#86630 (Paris Oplopoios / Justin Luth, Collabora)
  • Initial machine translation is available, backend by DeepL translate (Mert Tumer, Collabora) core commit e20d2, tdf#34058
  • Added pivot table compact layout. core commit 2f8d1 (Dennis Francis, Collabora)
  • Display soft breaks as line breaks at fontwork. tdf#148000 (Attila Szűcs, Collabora)
  • Added support to open multi image tiff files tdf#155444 (Rashesh Padia, Collabora)
  • Auto fitting text scaling algorithm has been changed so it works similar to MS Office. (Tomaž Vajngerl, Collabora)

Of course, we also had many of our developers share their work in the LibreOffice Technology devroom at FOSDEM this year. You can find links to their talks and slides in our blog.

 

Partners

This year we have welcomed 20 new partners from across Europe, Australia and South America including Oodrive, Salesframe, Aridhia and unodata. We are very happy to have a growing partner network allowing more and more users to take control of their data.

Team

This year we have seen our team grow, adding another 17 people to our core team at Collabora Productivity within our Sales, Marketing and Technical teams, with 50% of these coming from the Collabora Online Community. We love to hire smart people who have contributed to the Open Source community. This allows us to provide a richer experience for our partners and customers.

Collabora Online Community Contributions

The Collabora Online Community kept growing and helped to improve the software through their commits, feedback, and translations. You can see from the stats above that our Community is doing great things! You too, can help to make Collabora Online better. Join the discussions in our forum, join our community calls every Thursday at 12pm CET, translate strings on Weblate, file bug reports or feature requests on GitHub and spread the word on Collabora Online!

 

The Collabora Online SDK ⚙️

The 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. This year we continued to add to our information to enable better integrations and clearer guidance.

A small sample of some 2023 updates:

 

Thanks to all who helped out!

It has been an exciting year here at Collabora Productivity, and we are so grateful to everyone who has been involved in 2023, and indeed for the past ten years – customers, partners, staff, and the community. We couldn’t have achieved any of these things without everyone working together so well. We have big plans for 2024 and are anticipating an even more exciting year ahead. We look forward to sharing it with you!

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, if you’d like to partner with us, or to download Collabora Online. Thank you for the great support this year. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thank You!

 

News by Collabora Directly into your Inbox 📨

Keep up to date with our public newsletter. If you would like to receive regular updates with all the news and updates about Collabora Online, Collabora Office and future events, please sign up to our newsletter.

Thank you for a marvellous 2022!

Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

Thank You for Everything We Achieved Together in 2022 🤝

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. Luckily, the year 2022 was less dominated by the global pandemic. Throughout the year, international travelling became easier and in-person events and conferences became much more common again. However, the world kept being shaken. The Russian assault on Ukraine emphasized once again the massive importance of digital sovereignty, as Michael Meeks pointed out in several of his talks, like his Digital Sovereignty talk at the SFScon22.

Collabora held the first in-person COOL Days 2022 in Berlin, which brought together partners, the team, and the community. Collabora Online, Collabora Office and our mobile apps have all seen major performance improvements and increased functionality. We released the new major release of our flagship product Collabora Online 22.05, including performance boosts and impressing new features. Thank you for your support! Let’s take a look at what we have achieved together this year. 💜

Collabora Online 22.05: New Features and Better Performance 📈

With the release of version 22.05, Collabora Online reached new heights in performance, interoperability and usability. Many exciting features that had earlier been implemented and fine-tuned inside CODE 22.05, have been introduced this month.

Collabora Online 22.05 Brings Grammar Checking, Giant Spreadsheets and Performance Wins

Grammar check in a Writer Document in Collabora Online 22.05
Sparklines in Collabora Online 22.05
Translate using DeepL in Collabora Online
Consistent Language identification in Collabora Online 21.11

 

CODE 22.05 Cutting-Edge Features and Path to a Rock-Solid Enterprise Version 💪

The latest major release of the Collabora Online Development Edition CODE 22.05 was released in June. Versions of CODE always appear in advance of the corresponding version of Collabora Online. The Development Edition contains all new features which are extensively tested before being incorporated into the Enterprise version. An overview of CODE releases for the year 2022 can be found in the release notes. You can find the conversations about CODE on social media, by searching for the hashtag #cool_dev on Mastodon or Twitter.

 

More Groundbreaking Major Releases: Collabora Online 21.11✌️

The Year 2022 saw two major releases. In January, we released the enterprise version 21.11 of Collabora Online. It included a complete redesign of the sidebar, enhancing its responsiveness and had a strong focus on performance enhancements.

Collabora Online 21.11 Including a New Sidebar, RTL Support and Performance Boosts

  • January 2022, major release 21.11 introducing a quicker, “native” sidebar, right-to-left support, Calc-Excel compatible formulae and improved PPTX import
  • March 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.2 including Accessibility Checker, faster rotation of bitmap graphics, and an improved UX
  • April 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.3, dynamic configuration of multiple hosts and improvements for complex commenting cases
  • May 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.4, toggling between Compact View and Tabbed View now available through the user interface, several functions added to the UI’s
  • June 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.5, support of emphasis animations (spin, grow, shrink) in SVG presentation engine of Collabora Online Impress
  • August 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.6, many fixes added including the zoom factors in the glow and soft edge effects and the CSV import dialog
  • October 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.7, fixed selection of candidates for Japanese IME input, UI for adding print ranges in Calc, and override CheckFileInfo
  • October 2022, Collabora Online 21.11.8 several fixes like the SVG export of text fields, a memory leak related to the remote config feature, UI fixes
RTL support introduced in Collabora Online 21.11
Fast image rotation in Collabora Online 21.11.2
Consistent Language identification in Collabora Online 21.11

 

Powerful New Features for Collabora Office on the Desktop 🖥️

Collabora Office 22.05 Continues Enhancing Productivity and Interoperability

May 2022 saw the latest major release of Collabora Office, our long term supported desktop Office Suite for Windows, macOS, and Linux. This release brought a number of powerful productivity features like spreadsheets with 16,000 columns, sparklines to Calc (funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme) and saw linked paragraph and character styles arrive in Writer. The new features developed by Collabora are now also available in LibreOffice 7.4. Collabora Office for Windows is available through the Microsoft Store. The latest version for macOS can be bought from the App Store. Furthermore, we are encouraging you to help us test the latest features inside our unstable snapshots.

Buy for Windows

Try the Demo

Buy for macOS

Further updates throughout the year included additional features & improvements:

  • September 2022, Collabora Office 22.05.6 including chart data tables, document themes in Impress, and content controls in Writer
  • November 2022, Collabora Office 22.05.8 new Content Control features (combo box, titles, tags) PDF export of the content controls mapped to PDF forms
16384 columns available in Calc in Collabora Office 22.05
Sparklines in Collabora Office 22.05
Enhanced interoperability of transparent shadows in tables in Collabora Office 22.05

Collabora Office 21.06 Saw Updates and Improvements

Numerous Fixes & Updates for Collabora Office 6.4

Moreover, the Collabora Office 6.4 branch saw numerous updates, mostly including fixes and performance and interoperability improvements. You can find these changes documented inside the release notes.

 

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

Collabora Office Brings Powerful Office Productivity to Your Pocket

This year saw a major update of Collabora Office for Android, iOS & Chrome OS including numerous advanced productivity features, excellent document compatibility and a much improved user experience. The first major release to version 21.11 included performance improvements, a faster & responsive toolbar on tablets, enhanced contextual Toolbars, better shadow effects and much more.

  • April 2022, Collabora Office 21.11.3 for Android, iOS & Chrome OS – major release including Contextual toolbars, improved PPTX import, blurry shadows, soft edges for objects
  • August 2022, Collabora Office 21.11.6 for Android, iOS & Chrome OS – improved user experience and fixes
Improved Import of PPTX with Shaped Images

 

Contextual Toolbars enhancing the user experience
Improved Shadow Effects
Glow & Soft Edge effects

 

 Amazing News, Interesting Figures 📈

280 Partners Worldwide

In 2022, our large network of amazing partners kept growing. We can now rely on over 280 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!

 

Collabora’s Contributions to LibreOffice 7.3 and 7.4

Collabora is part of the ecosystem developing and advancing LibreOffice technology. Our developers are responsible for many commits to the LibreOffice core. Thanks to the sponsorship of our clients, we were able to introduce many new features and improvements to LibreOffice 7.3 and LibreOffice 7.4. The LibreOffice 7.3 release saw many performance focused enhancements (increased PDF export speed of some complex documents, faster loading of large RTL documents and insertion of large charts, rendering improvements in the Skia-based rendering backend and introduction of a Skia-based rendering backend on macOS). We also introduced numerous new features and interoperability improvements to LibreOffice 7.4. This version saw the arrival of native rich text and checkbox content controls support from Word, remote LanguageTool grammar checking, support for sparklines (funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme) and the use of 16384 columns in Calc and support for WebP images. Find more technical background on some of our contributions inside this blog. More great stuff is going to arrive in LibreOffice 7.5. We appreciate any help in testing. You’ll find the latest features in a Collabora Office snapshot or a pre-released Dev-Version of LibreOffice.

Linked paragraph and character styles in Writer
Example with 3 types of sparklines

 

Collabora Online Community Contributions #cool_dev 📈

The Collabora Online Community kept growing and helped to improve the software through their commits, feedback, and translations. You can see from the stats above that our Community is doing great things! You, too, can help to make Collabora Online better. Join the discussions in our forum, translate strings on Weblate, file bug reports or feature requests on GitHub and spread the word on Collabora Online!

 

The Collabora Online SDK ⚙️

The 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. Of course, we added new documentations to the SDK this year for new features like the DeepL Translator (sponsored by Adfinis) or the LanguageTool Grammar Checker.

 

Starting at a Distance, Coming together in Person Again 🤝

The beginning of the year 2022 was still heavily impacted by the global pandemic. Major events like FOSDEM 2022 or the FOSSASIA Summit 2022 took place as remote events. Others had been rescheduled to a later date, like the Univention Summit. Luckily, throughout the year, travelling became easier again, and many conferences, such as the LibreOffice Conference in Milan, and the Nextcloud Conference in Berlin, could take place in person again. In October, we held our own COOL Days in Berlin – for the first time as an in-person meeting with the Collabora team, community and our partners.

COOL Days 2022 in Berlin

This year, for the first time ever, we were able to host the COOL Days as an in-person event. The three-day event focused exclusively on topics related to Collabora Online – and on some fun and team building experiences. Read the wrap-up of our activities from the community day, the partner day and the tech day on our blog. All the recordings of the talk from the Tech Day can be found on our playlist on YouTube, many slides can be found inside our repository on GitHub. The next COOL Days are coming very soon… Join us in Cambridge in March 2023!

COOL Days 2022 Impressions

Ready for take-off? We went skydiving.
Joining staff and partners at the COOL Days
Developer talks at the Tech Day

COOL Days 2022 Videos

Using DeepL in Collabora Online by Jan Holesovsky
Dynamic Font Download by Tor Lillqvist
PDF Export Advanced Options by Miklos Vajna

 

FOSDEM 2022 – A Massive Remote Experience

Whether on-site in Brussels or as an online event like 2022 – FOSDEM is one of the major gatherings for Open-Source developers. The Collabora team held several talks on Collabora Online and LibreOffice technology. Find the all videos of our talks in our FOSDEM 2022 playlist and all the slides in our blog.

Click image to download slides, click here for the video
Click image to download slides, click here for the video
Click image to download slides, click here for the video

 

Collabora at the LibreOffice Conference in Milan

This year’s LibreOffice Conference was held in Milan and saw many talks by the Collabora team. All the recordings are available in our YouTube playlist and the slides can be downloaded from our blog.

Click image to download slides, click here for the video
Click image to download slides, click here for the video
Click image to download slides, click here for the video

 

News by Collabora Directly into your Inbox 📨

Keep up to date with our public newsletter. If you would like to receive regular updates like this one on the news on Collabora Online, Collabora Office and future COOL Days events, please sign up to our newsletter.

 

Summary

It has been a very busy year here at Collabora Productivity. We have enjoyed 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 some challenging conditions that persisted in 2022. The Berlin edition of COOL Days was one of the highlights for us this year. We have big plans for 2023, some of them unfolding already in early spring! Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, if you’d like to partner with us, or to download Collabora Online. Thank you for the great support this year. We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thank You!

Take advantage of style and grammar checking of your texts in Collabora Online

Naomi Obbard 3 Comments

Writing grammatically correct and stylistically beautiful texts in the browser has now become much more convenient. LanguageTool, known to desktop users of Collabora Office and LibreOffice as a powerful grammar checker extension, is now also available for Collabora Online. In this article you can find out how to use it for your online documents.

About LanguageTool

LanguageTool’s mission is to unleash the professional writing skills in every user. It is an open-source project based on AI-technology that analyses the style, tonality, and typography of text and instantly generates context-aware suggestions. The software supports spell- and grammar checking for 30 languages and is constantly being enhanced by an international team of linguistic professionals and machine learning experts. Besides the plug-ins for desktop office suits, it offers add-ons for all major browsers.

 

Get LanguageTool

 

Some Preliminary Comments

Many users of LanguageTool’s browser add-ons may already be familiar with how LanguageTool works. Once installed, it automatically highlights errors in composed online forms and text fields in different colours. However, the documents we edit in Collabora Online are not text in the true sense of the word, as the document never leaves its location on the server. Users only see image renderings of the document during editing. For this reason, a server-side setting must be made to activate LanguageTool. For more information, please consult the technical documentation on LanguageTool. Additionally, a paid premium account with LanguageTool offers better checking results and a larger selection of alternative formulations.

Using LanguageTool in Collabora Online

Through the integration of LanguageTool, different types of errors in text are now highlighted in different colours within Collabora Online. Spelling errors continue being indicated by a red underlining. Grammatical errors are indicated by an orange underline, while stylistic errors are underlined in blue. If you mark the highlighted error, you can display alternative formulations by right-clicking and selecting them through the context menu. LanguageTool’s grammar correction works in all Collabora Online modules, i.e., not only in text documents but also in spreadsheets, presentations, or Draw designs.

Step-by-step Procedure

  1. Write your text in Collabora Online
  2. LanguageTool automatically detects and underlines mistakes in your text
  3. Right-click the underlined segment to open the context menu with LanguageTool suggestions
  4. Choose the prefered suggestion from the context menu

Examples of Grammar- and Style Checking with LanguageTool

Here are just a few examples of style and grammar mistakes that LanguageTool can detect.

  1. Terms spelled with a hyphen
  2. Wrong use of nouns and pronouns
  3. Start of sentences in lower case
  4. Typographical Mistakes (missing or needless commas, typographical ellipsis character, unpaired parentheses)
  5. (Presumably) Incorrect dates and weekday (Weekday and date mismatch, dates in the future)
  6. Successive beginning of sentences with the same word
  7. Stylistic redundancies (e.g., 6 PM in the afternoon)
Unpaired Symbol message from LanguageTool in Collabora Online
Successive beginning of sentences with the same word detected by Language Tool in Collabora Online

 

 

Afterword and Thank You

As mentioned above, to make use of this feature, you have to enable this inside Collabora Online’s configuration file. Depending on whether you are using a free or a premium account, both the quality and amount of the suggestions may vary. We would like to express our gratitude to Nicolas Christener and his wonderful team at Adfinis for making this great feature a reality.

CODE 22.05 Released with Powerful New Features like Grammar Checks, Sparklines and “Jumbo Spreadsheets”

Marc Rodrigues 6 Comments

This New Major Release Brings Grammar Checking, Giant Spreadsheets and Performance Wins

Cambridge, June 29, 2022 – Collabora announces the availability of Collabora Online Developer Edition (CODE) 22.05. The latest major release targets three key areas: ease of use, performance, and interoperability. It demonstrates the company’s mission of being the technology leader in collaborative editing. Collabora Online businesses the most effective and secure document creation environment with dedicated support and depth of development horsepower. CODE 22.05 is preceding the next major release of our long-term supported business suite Collabora Online. This free developer version includes all features and enhancements that will be available in our enterprise version, expected later in July. The CODE releases allow every interested user to learn and test new features on an early stage. As always, your feedback on possible issues is much appreciated! CODE is the collaboration suite offering home users and early adopters the best features, interoperability in open source, while respecting user privacy and data security. In this announcement, we are showcasing some of the latest functionalities added to Collabora Online.

 

Get CODE 22.05

 

Using Grammar and Style Checks in the Browser

Grammar checking in a Writer Document in CODE 22.05

Starting with version 22.05 we introduced the support for external grammar checkers. You can now benefit from the style and grammar checker by LanguageTool in your browser. To make use of this feature, you have to enable this inside Collabora Online’s configuration file. Depending on whether you are using a free or a premium account, both the quality and amount of the suggestions may vary. We would like to express our gratitude to Nicolas Christener and his wonderful team at Adfinis for making this great feature a reality.

 

“Jumbo Spreadsheets” with 16k Columns in Calc

CODE 22.05 increases the maximum number of columns available in Calc to 16384

Collabora Online does now support up to 16384 columns in spreadsheets. This is a sixteenfold increase in the maximum number of columns compared to previous versions. Previously, Calc would display an error message on opening large sheets that exceeded 1024 columns. Combined with up to one million rows per spreadsheet, Calc can now handle enormous amounts of data on the right hardware. Previous performance improvements in Calc paved the way for this feature, which also increases the interoperability with Excel spreadsheets from Microsoft. This work was funded by DEVxDAO as part of their mission to support open-source and transparent research and development of emerging technologies and frameworks.

 

Sparklines Now Available for Calc

Sparklines for Calc have arrived in CODE 22.05

Sparklines are mini-charts found in Microsoft’s XLSX format. The support for them premieres with the release of Collabora Office 22.05. Sparklines are always defined for one cell, but different ones can be grouped together. There are three different ways of displaying Sparklines. They can be displayed as lines, bar charts or stacked as win-loss charts. The Sparklines feature can be accessed through the right-click dialog. The unique data for a Sparkline is defined in the data range.

This feature was made possible by funding from NGI and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871498. For more information on the technical background, see Tomaz Vajngerl’s blog.

 

Webp support available for all types of documents

CODE 22.05 supports the WebP format across all modules

WebP is a graphics format for lossy or lossless image compression. It can be used for both static and animated images and is also supported by the vast majority of modern browsers. The current version of CODE now allows for importing images in WebP format. The graphic format can now be used in all document types, i.e. in text documents, spreadsheets, presentations as well as Draw files.

 

Content Controls in Writer: Dropdown, Picture and Date Types

Content Controls menu in Collabora Online Writer 22.05

Writer now has content controls functionality, a new way to set properties on a piece of text, primarily for form filling purposes. This feature improves compatibility with the DOCX format. There are now five types of inline Content Controls that can be imported and added to Collabora Online. Writer had already included form controls and fieldmarks, providing similar features. However, there are some differences in their behaviour. Among other differences, Content Controls can contain rich text and a set of properties. Instead of fieldmarks, they can’t span over different paragraphs. Here is a small summary of the capabilities of the new Content Controls.

  • Rich Text Content Controls simply show an indicator when you’re inside the content
  • Checkbox Content Controls contain a single character, but you can interact with them: clicking on the content control toggles the checked state of the checkbox
  • Dropdown Content Controls have a list of dropdown items. Each item is a display-text and value pair, allowing to differentiate between a human-readable string and a machine-readable value.
  • Picture Content Controls allow the author of a form to pre-format the image before the filler of the form inserts the actual image.
  • Date Content Controls were emulated with Writer fieldmarks in the past, which created trouble during export, since Word itself doesn’t have a date form-field.
Date Content Control in Collabora Online 22.05
Date Content Control Properties in Collabora Online 22.05

This feature has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871498. For more information on the technical background, see Miklos Vajna’s blog post.

 

New Formula Input Bar with Pure HTML

Faster native rendering of the input of formulae in Calc

We continue working in the conversion of various UI components in Collabora Online to “native” HTML widgets. This helps to get better user experience, especially on touch and mobile devices. This time we have converted the formula bar which is used to edit data in cells inside a spreadsheet.

Previous “tunnelled” approaches had some disadvantages like a blurry look under some conditions and a cursor position setup depending on pixel-based coordinates. Now the edit field is rendered by the browser, ensuring a crisp display of text under all circumstances and resolutions. The position of the caret is represented as a logical value and also handled by the browser. This adds a lot of benefits to the user experience. It has now become much easier to type into the formula bar, especially on touch devices.

New formula input bar in CODE 22.05 using a touch device

 

Bandwidth wins and improved performance with Deltas

Previous versions of Collabora Online have managed documents as a series of tiles, when a tile is invalidated by its contents changing, new tiles have been compressed and sent. Interestingly this cost usually outweighed all other rendering and managing of document content. In this version we adopt a simple time-based compression – whereby for actively changing tiles we send the user a small set of changes since the last tile. Thus if you type a ‘period’ we can generate a tiny compressed change for just those pixels. This gives up to a 75% bandwidth saving depending on your workload – as well as saving CPU time. We also have laid the foundation for switching to a far faster zstd compression library in the 22.05 lifetime to save yet more CPU cycles and serve more users from the same server hardware.

 

Accessibility Check Helps to Create Documents According to the PDF/UA Standard

Accessibility Check in CODE 22.05

The current version of CODE includes a new Accessibility Checker. This helps to create documents according to the PDF/UA standard. Published as an International Standard in 2012 (ISO 14289), the PDF/UA format provides clear normative terms for achieving accessibility in the PDF format. The goal is to enable users to use documents without assistance from others, and to be able to receive the same value from the content as people without disabilities. This is accomplished by standardization of the content structure within the PDF files and the technology capabilities available to the end user, including PDF readers and assistive technologies (AT).

The Accessibility Check is part of the first step in an ongoing journey to improve accessibility, both in Collabora Online (Browser) and Collabora Office (Desktop). The Accessibility Check button can be found in the Review tab. The dialog shows a list of all issues found in the text document. Through a quick access button, it is possible to access the critical element. The issue is highlighted. See this article for more details on the already implemented checks.

 

Faster Rotation of Bitmap Graphics

Fast image rotation in Collabora Online 22.05

The rotation of bitmap graphics has undergone a significant speed improvement. When rotating graphics via the button (the slightly off-set filled circle above a selected graphic), the movement is now much smoother and easier to position. This improvement makes manipulating bitmap graphics much more comfortable. Here’s how you can try it for yourself. Select a bitmap graphic by clicking on it. Move the cursor to the grey circle above the graphic. The cursor now changes into a palm. Now move the palm cursor to the right and left as you wish while holding down the left mouse button.

 

Dynamic Configuration of Multiple Hosts

 

Collabora Online uses a WOPI-like protocol to interact with hosts who want to integrate Collabora Online. The improved admin configurations allow for multiple WOPI hosts with multiple aliases. This means you can use a single Collabora Online server with different software integrations at the same time. It is also possible to manage these hosts dynamically without a server restart. This makes Collabora Online much easier to deploy and configure, particularly when scaling to integrate with large numbers of different services. All of this saves cost and reduces management complexity, making this feature especially interesting for hosting companies. We have summarized the technical background information on Multihost Configuration inside our SDK documentation.

LibreOffice Technology

CODE and Collabora Online are built with LibreOffice Technology by the LibreOffice community in which we love to participate. We cannot thank everyone involved enough for their passionate work.

 

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.

 

Get CODE 22.05

 

Open Source – so feel welcome to join

Before we conclude with some final improvements and news, we really want to let you know about all the people that did the hard work. Thanks to the community that made this release possible! Collabora has invested significantly in bringing a host of new features and functionality to this latest release, and accounts for the overwhelming volume of contributions. However, we want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues who helped to contribute not only to this, but also to the underlying LibreOffice technology. All of our code is open source, and available to the public on GitHub. Would you like to be part of the Collabora Online success story? Check the new website for Online with information, easy hacks and a forum for Online, report issues, and participate today!