After a lot of encouraging feedback we received on the major 4.2.0 Online release, we’re happy to now announce the first update!
New Features
Context menu option to put a shape or image to the background of text on Writer. (Wrap → Wrap Through + In Background, Arrange → To Background and To Foreground)
Shape moved to the background of a Writer document. Click on the image to start animation!
Writer documents can be exported to EPUB format. Use File > Download as > EPUB (.epub)
This uses the default similar to File > Export As > Export Directly As EPUB in LibreOffice / Collabora Office.
Export as EPUB in Collabora Online!
Improved features
Consistent Calc formula bar focusing in all cases
Possibility to easily navigate across wide merged cells in Calc
You can use Table of Contents links in Writer document
Updated translations
Fixes
In some cases the font dropdown contained only 2 fonts instead of all fonts installed. This has been fixed
Search bar did not accept letter ‘r’. This has been fixed
Fixed slide reordering by drag-and-drop in Impress
Fixed printing in Internet Explorer 11
Collabora Online never supported opening .oxt files (LibreOffice extensions) and .odb files (LibreOffice database files). We removed these file types from WOPI discovery.xml
Fixed the z-index of some pop-up dialogs, e.g. the warning to exceeded document/connection limit dialog is visible again
Fixed download action when server is running with no capabilities
On CentOS 8, Ubuntu 18.04, and Debian 10, which have OpenSSL 1.1.1, now we link loolwsd with Poco 1.10.1. That solves SSL connection issues, e.g. connecting to sites that have certificates made with elliptic curve key
On some systems the “child-root” jails were not cleaned up after use. This has been fixed
4.2.0 information
Since this version is an update. you may be interested in the information on the major release 4.2.0.
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 @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.
A perfect combination of functionality and privacy
Cambridge, United Kingdom, March 5, 2020 – Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind bringing LibreOffice to the cloud, is excited to announce a major new release of the enterprise-ready online suite Collabora Online 4.2.0. This release includes a fresh look, mobile improvements and better interoperability alongside new dialogs and functionality. Collabora Online enables users and enterprises to work on rich documents in the cloud and to collaborate effectively hosting their own services on-premise. Collabora Online is the perfect online document solution for organizations and services that want to choose digital sovereignty, respect for their users privacy and want to stay in control of their own documents and data.
A fresh clean look, feature rich side-bar, and much much more
This major update of Collabora Online comes with a fresh new user interface and is built on top of the stability and performance of our LTS version of LibreOffice: Collabora Office 6.2. This new Collabora Online includes many improvements in functionality and user-friendliness as well as a raft of bug fixes and polish. The most obvious new feature is the powerful sidebar, which allows users to easily change settings for text, tables, colours, charts and other objects in the documents. It gives Collabora Online almost the same feature- richness available in Collabora Office on the desktop. Furthermore there is a redesigned status bar, much-improved toolbars and a powerful function wizard now available in Calc online. Copy and paste of rich text and content is added for online functions, and our responsive user interface adapts attractively to smaller and mobile screen sizes.
Extending our great interoperability
Among the all improvements, there is also much improved interoperability with Microsoft Office files. Smart art, rotated and left-right text in tables, pivot tables, special sections and headers in text files, math and gradients in Powerpoint files and muchmore.
Rich chart functions from the sidebar
The sidebar now gives you access to a wide range of features for charts. Select the chart and it is easy to choose from chart types such as bars, lines and points, pies and more, and also whether the diagram should be displayed in 3D. The sidebar also provides other elements and details, for example titles and legends, colours, transparency, axes and grids. All you need for rich chart editing, is available in Collabora Online.
Editing Charts in Collabora Online
Click to see it in action:
Magic in Calc online with a powerful function wizard for your formulae
If you work on formulae, especially more complex formulae with many parameters, the function wizard in Calc is extremely helpful. It makes handling complex formulae as simple as possible by offering access to all elements of the structure and showing detailed explanation for the different arguments. This makes using the full set of hundreds of interoperable formulae easy!
Powerful function wizard in Collabora Online spreadsheets
In excellent condition: Calc brings full conditional formatting
Conditional formatting is a very effective way to understand and visualize your data: you can choose what formatting or icons your cells will receive for certain values.
Collabora Online already offered a limited palette of conditional formats in the tool bar, but the new version of Collabora Online now gives you access to the full set of possibilities by displaying the dialogs for the feature. All you need for creating and adapting conditional formatting is now available in Collabora Online.
Collabora Online offers full conditional formatting features
Smooth zooming in Calc: scaling of spreadsheets improves significantly
The scaling of spreadsheets sees a major improvement in Collabora Online 4.2.0. While previously (as in other products) the choice was 100% or 200%, now you can select a zoom level that best suits you. This improvement is accessible with a comfortable quick selector in the lower right corner.
Proudly presenting the cool and handy Impress sidebar
Collabora Online now brings you lots of new functionality via the new sidebar in Impress. You can adjust character settings, font-types, objects, sizes, colours, spacing and more from the sidebar. In addition changing the slide layout and even choosing and editing Master Slides is also possible. This provides unprecedented functionality for online editing and is very convenient! All you need to use and edit presentations is available in Collabora Online.
The sidebar in Collabora Online offers users great control for presentations
A fantastic image: working with pictures is easier and more precise
Images are fun, and working with them across all types of documents has been massively improved in Collabora Online 4.2.0. Rotating is easy with the clear handles and the new sidebar allows you to adjust colours, brightness, contrast and transparency. You can also use the sidebar module to arrange the foreground or background positioning of your images.
Paste how you like: rich copy/paste features between different documents
When doing work online, you frequently have multiple documents open that need to be combined via copy and paste. In the browser, however, rich copy and paste features are far from trivial. Now the great news is that Collabora Online introduces copying and pasting of rich formatted content like images, charts, and other complex elements across different types of document. Almost all you can wish for working in multiple documents, is now available in Collabora Online.
Rich copy and paste in calc
Enhanced online colour picker
Selecting your desired colour for an object is much more convenient in Collabora Online 4.2.0. In addition to the usual colour selector offering a palette, a new colour picker to choose any custom colour is now available. Use it with text and background in presentations, lines in spreadsheets and presentations, text and background for floating frames in text documents.
Improved collaborative editing with clear links in text documents
Launching links in previous versions required a control-click, which was hard to discover. In Collabora Online 4.2.0, when you collaborate on a document and you want to know the destination of a link, then our new release shows it at a glance. If the mouse cursor is over a link, you will see a pop-up displaying the links target. The pop-up also allows you to see and access the destination with a single click.
Redesigned and clear new icons and a attractive theme
The new design of the icons embellishes the upper toolbar. The new theme is tidier, generally clearer and has more generous spacing, with more distinct highlighting of selected buttons. All of this increases productivity and reduces friction.
New buttons and theming make things more attractive and easier to work with
The status bar benefits from our visual redesign too. Not only does it look cleaner, it also improves quick access to more functions. For example, the language in documents can now also be set via a pop-up.
Table editing: faster with the sidebar and in-document handles
In Collabora Online Writer it is now possible to manipulate tables extensively from the sidebar and we have also added easy-to-use in-document selection handles that make adjusting row height and column width very user-friendly. These features are a convenient extension of the table dialogue, that still also offer access to the tiniest details.
Collabora Online Tables in text documents
You want to insert rows or columns from here? Of course! Or delete some or all of them? A click! Furthermore, the sidebar also allows you to set the background colour, to fine-tune the sizes of rows and columns, as well as merging cells or distributing them evenly. Really all you would wish for if you are working with tables, is available in Collabora Online.
Table of contents
Collabora Online now allows you to configure the full table of contents in text documents, thanks to the new Table of Contents dialog. So even online, you can customize your complex table of contents in a few clicks according to your wishes. For example, you can edit the entries and change style, background or columns. In the same way you can update indices of figures, tables and so forth. This brings the full power of rich table of contents and index creation to Collabora Online.
Collabora Online offers rich table of contents for text document
Get Collabora Online 4.2
Collabora Online 4.2.0 is our first release of our next development series, suitable for large scale deployment, and comes with SLA, enterprise support with signed security updates as well as interaction with product management, helping to direct our development priorities. (Customers can find the URL for the repository in the customer portal.)
Collabora Online integrates flawlessly into Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, and many of the major file sync & share, groupware and hosting solutions. It is ideal for organizations that want to collaborate on documents without losing control over them or compromising on privacy. With the ability to host it on your own hardware or to integrate it into a trusted environment, Collabora Online is the ideal online office suite for digital sovereignty. Enterprises interested in using Collabora Online can check out our home page for more information on partner integrations and online demos. Hosting and Cloud businesses that wish to add Collabora Online to their product portfolio can become a partner. For any questions or tailored solutions, do not hesitate to contact sales@collaboraoffice.com.
Get access to the online demo of Collabora Online 4.2.0 and discover its potential!
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 document technology, you can checkout LibreOffice community credits. We cannot thank everyone involved enough for their passionate work. All of our code is contributed to LibreOffice, and can be expected in LibreOffice 7, although we have our own branding and theme. Would you like to be part of the story ? Get involved today!
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 @CollaboraOffice on Twitter.
Christmas and the end of the year are a time to reflect on the events of the past months. We have come a long way together and would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our customers, partners and community for your great support! 2019 has been a big year with important new releases for mobile devices. We brought Collabora Office to iOS and released a complete rewrite of our Android app. Collabora Office, Collabora Online and CODE have seen significant growth in features and improvements in usability.
Our products now bring effective collaboration with maximum control for organizations. A truly Open Source product that gives users ontrol over their own data and privacy, with excellent Microsoft interoperability, on every platform. The team at Collabora keeps growing, and more people than ever before are benefiting from our products and code contributions. Of course, this all would not have been possible without our talented staff, our great partners and the engaged community of volunteers around LibreOffice.
You all have made 2019 a fantastic year. Here is a short summary of what we achieved together!
Collabora Online improvements
Collabora Online 4.0.0
In January, we celebrated the major release Collabora Online 4.0.0 including a completely fresh look. It featured a better, simplified and more appealing UI. It also marked the point where we started to bring more of the full functionality for important features available online such as custom headers and footers or rich table of contents management for text documents.
Collabora Online 4.0 also featured integration with Vereign. We partnered with the Swiss open source company to provide authentic documents bearing the qualified electronic signature of your hardened self-sovereign identity.
Collabora Online 4.0.2 & 4.0.3
March brought two versions with notable fixes and updates. For example, when collaborating on a single document it really helps users to see the names being displayed over the caret of the people that are actively typing and moving through the document.
Collabora Online 4.0.4
This release in May added the feature to rename a file while editing.
This version introduces new admin features and made integration easier via the reuse cookie option for WOPI implementations.
Collabora Online 4.0.7
In September, we added the opacity setting to configure tile Watermarks, as well as our regular set of interoperability improvements.
Collabora Online 4.0.8
In October version 4.0.8 provided different watermarks for each user for use with ownCloud’s ‘secure collaboration’ and Nextcloud’s ‘secure view‘.
Collabora Online can give each user it’s own watermark
Collabora Online 4.0.9
To improve security, and make them harder to ignore we added 45 degrees rotated user-watermarks for collaboration in these secure environments, as well as several fixes such as highlighting search results in read-only documents.
CODE 4.2.0 sets the bar for the next year
In December, we released a major refresh and upgrade of CODE, the Collabora Online Development Edition. CODE is perfect for home users that want to start to run their own online office suite and for tech-enthusiast. This CODE version is the base for the upcoming Collabora Online 4.2.0 release, due in early 2020. It has a fresh new look, with updated theming, and a refreshed toolbar, and we dare to say that it represents another huge step forward in features for online office productivity and collaboration!
One of the major improvements is the powerful sidebar. Changing properties of many elements and objects in office documents is now much while working in the browser, with close to the same feature richness that is available in Collabora Office on the desktop.
The sidebar and new dialogs support numerous advanced features.
Besides choosing a colour from a palette, you can also make use of the colour picker. The handling of links has also been improved.
Click to see some of the sidebar magic happen in Calc!
All the powerful functions of Conditional Formatting in Calc can now be controlled via the dialog.
Collabora Office 6.0.2 & 6.0.3 add new features
Un-float Table button in Writer
Collabora Office, our enterprise-grade, long term supported open-source office suite, sees major updates, new features and interoperability improvements every year. In January, Collabora Office 6.0.2 introduced the Unfloat Table button, making it easy to work with imported floating tables from Microsoft Word documents.
Another big ask from our customers was for redaction, so this year we created a built-in Redaction tool, and went on to extend that with fast and automatic marking of text.
Another really useful feature, particularly for web integration of spreadsheets is the Page per sheet PDF export we implemented for Calc, allowing users to see apparently non-paginated spreadsheet previews.
Collabora Office 6.2: The best in features, interoperability and support in open source
And right before the end of the year, we made another huge step. Not only concerning the release points, but also in features and interoperability. Version 6.2 came just in time for Christmas.
This includes many features from ourselves and the community, such as the enhanced printing dialog, and improved Help which make working with Collabora Office even more efficient and user-friendly.
Collabora Office on Apple iOS
In 2019 we delivered our first version for Apple’s tablets. In a huge joint effort together with Adfinis SyGroup, started in 2018, we brought Collabora Office to iOS (beta). It is now available through Apple’s app store for free.
Collabora Office on iOS for editing spreadsheets.
Creating presentations in Collabora Office iOS
Composing texts in Collabora Office iOS.
Making the app easier to use: The sidebar contains contextual features and makes good use of the wide screen of the iPad.
Working with tables in text documents.
Including pictures in Writer documents
Selection of cells in a spreadsheet
Collabora Office on Android
Shortly after the release of Collabora Office on iOS, we released a complete re-write of Collabora Office on Android. This is now based on the same technology as Collabora Online. More than just a viewer it allows the editing of documents with a new phone-friendly UI. The beta version is available from the Google Play Store.
Text file with spreadsheet embedded – Collabora Office for Android
Image handling in text document – Collabora Office for Android
Community & LibreOffice
We love to work alongside with, and contribute to the LibreOffice community. We were pleased to sponsor the LibreOffice Conference 2019 that took place in Almería, Spain.
One day before the conference we organized a special team building day for our staff, partners and customers and went snorkelling in Cabo de Gata. Big fun!
Conference Slides
2019 has also been a year full of traveling, conferences, … and of course slides. Here are just a few examples of talks held by Michael Meeks, Andras Timar and Jan Holešovský held this year. They and many others are available for download.
LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp in Ankara
As part of our community building investment we sponsored a LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp in Ankara. Here, Collabora Productivity Developer Muhammet Kara is teaching enthusiastic students of the Hacettepe University about C++ and developing LibreOffice. Pranam Lashkari has also been training students in India:
Summary
In summary, it has been a busy year here at Collabora Productivity. We can only present a small part of what we got up to with a few pictures and links in this overview. We have advanced our mission to make Open Source rock; giving users privacy and businesses control over their data, with our open products. Not only has our work produced excellent results, but we have also had a lot of fun. If you’d like to get involved its easy to partner with us, buy from us, or to get involved in the awesome LibreOffice community. We are full of energy and have lots of new ideas and plans in the pipeline for 2020. We would like to thank the whole team, particularly our great partners, and customers who make our work possible, and the community who make it fun, and we look forward to continuing the successful work with you in 2020!
Cambridge, United Kingdom, December 16, 2019 – Collabora Productivity, the driving force behind bringing LibreOffice to the cloud, is excited to announce a new, major release of our product CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition) 4.2.0 This release includes a fresh look, mobile improvements, improved inter-operability, new dialogs and functionality as well as a raft of bug fixes and polish. The release gives you an insight into our soon-to-be released enterprise version Collabora Online 4.2.0. CODE and Collabora Online offer privacy as well as the only truly open-source solution for working with and collaborating on rich documents in the cloud.
What’s new?
This major update of Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) comes with a rich new user interface and is built onto of the stability and performance of our LTS version of LibreOffice: Collabora Office 6.2. It includes many improvements in functionality and user-friendliness. The most obvious new feature is the powerful sidebar on the right. Many settings for text and all kind of properties of objects in the documents can be easily updated here. The sidebar makes it much easier to change tables, colour settings and charts elements in the browser, with close to the same feature richness that is available in Collabora Office on the desktop. The status bar has been redesigned and our powerful function wizard is now available in Calc online. Copy and paste of rich text and content is added for online, and our responsive user interface adapts nicely to mobile phones and tablets.
Rich chart functions from the side bar
When charts are selected, the sidebar now gives access to a wide range of features. For example, you can easily choose chart types from bars, lines and points, pies and more, or whether the diagram should be displayed in 3D.
Other elements of charts can now also be adjusted from the sidebar. You can now determine how and where titles and legends are displayed. Furthermore, many of the visual elements of the diagram can be adjusted here. The sidebar also allows you to define the surface colour, transparency, line types and grid lines.
Click to see that in action:
Online function wizard: a powerful tool for formulas
Working with formulas is important and especially for the more complex types, having help with the tenth optional parameter is good. The new function wizard does that and it is new available in Calc from now on. The function wizard grants easy access to all elements of also the most complex formulas. It shows the structure and meaning of different parts of a formula, and more.
Conditions apply: Enhanced formatting options in Calc
Conditional formatting is a powerful feature in Calc. It is enables you to quickly visualize data in a spreadsheet by setting various useful rules on your sheet to adapt the cells formatting, colour, or even add icons when certain criteria are met. While a simplified set of conditional formats was previously available via an icon in the toolbar, you can now also make use of the full dialogs, to be found in the Format menu, to define and manage conditions fully.
Better display in Calc: smooth scaling of spreadsheets
The scaling of spreadsheets has been significantly improved in CODE 4.2.0. While in Calc you could previously only choose between two zoom factors of 100% and 200%, now fine adjustment is are possible to suit. Using the convenient (and redesigned) quick selector in the lower right corner, you can now choose your favourite zoom percentage between 33% and 200%.
More presentation functions in the sidebar
The new sidebar adds many useful functions to Impress. For shapes and outlines, the size, position, colours, transparency, wrapping and so on are easy to change.
The possibilities to alter the slide master and lay out, from the sidebar, are also completely new in CODE 4.2. You can now access extensive layout functionality for slides such selecting masters, layouts and even editing your own master pages. Needless to say, that character settings, fonts types, sizes, colours and spacing can also be easily adjusted from the sidebar.
Handier working with images
Working with images in all document types is easier, more convenient and more precise. The sidebar allows to adjust colour options, such as brightness, contrast or transparency or the red, blue and green portion of the image. Another handy feature is the adjustment of the layer settings of the images. Bring them to the foreground or arrange them in the background – all via the sidebar.
Rich copy and paste between docx and xlsx documents and more… in the browser
People that work online, often have many documents open simultaneously, and want to mash them together into bigger, better documents. So you’ll be glad to learn the CODE 4.2.0 introduces copying of rich formatted content along with images, charts, and other complex elements, between your online spreadsheets, documents and presentations.
New online colour picker
For certain elements there is not only the usual colour selector, offering a palette, but also the colour picker to chose any custom colours needed. Use it with text and background in presentations, lines in spreadsheets and presentations, text and background for floating frames in text documents.
Handling links in Writer has just become more pleasant
CODE 4.2.0 brings very nice enhancements when working with hyperlinks. Whenever the mouse cursor is located next to a link or on it, you will be kindly notified by a pop-up dialogue allowing the real target to be inspected and launched conveniently with a single click.
Beautiful new icons and a redesigned theme
The new design of the icons embellishes the upper toolbar. The new theme is tidier has more generous spacing, and is clearer in general. It should increase productivity and reduce friction. Buttons that are selected have a clearer and more distinct highlight too.
The status bar also benefits from our visual redesign. Not only does it look cleaner, it also improves quick access to the functions located there. The language of documents can now also be set via a popup.
Table editing in the side bar and table handles
In Writer it is now possible to manipulate tables extensively from the sidebar and we also added easy to use in-document selection handles, choose either or both. Previously the table dialog had to be used, which was far less convenient. These handles make adjusting row height and column width very user-friendly.
You want to insert rows or columns from here? Of course! Or delete some or all of them? a click! Furthermore, the sidebar also allows you to set the background colour of the cells or to fine-tune their height and width of rows and columns. It becomes even more interesting if you select several cells. Then you can also merge them from the sidebar or distribute them evenly.
Table of contents
In text documents, the full table of contents can now be configured with the new dialogs. So even online, you can customize your complex table of contents in a few clicks according to your wishes. For example edit the entries and change style, background or columns.
About CODE
CODE is the Collabora Online Development Edition. It contains the latest developments and is perfect for home users that want to start to run their own online office suite. It enables them to regain control of their own online documents and host them themselves in their own controlled and private environment. For them and also for tech-enthusiast, it is a low-threshold way to get involved and familiar with our online office solution. CODE gives the possibility to be the first to use new features. It will be improved continuously and our next enterprise Collabora Online product will be built from it. Note that we recommend our supported and maintained enterprise release: Collabora Online for business and production environments. CODE warns users that they might want support after 10 concurrent documents or 20 concurrent users. Find out how about the different ways to install CODE on our product page.
As we come to Christmas and the new year, it is great to reflect on everything that we’ve achieved this year. Collabora Productivity would not exist without the funding, support and friendship of our partners and customers. When reviewing what we’ve achieved we’re really grateful for your trust & input into our product development, helping to guide which features and fixes we invest in next. Of course we could do nothing without our talented staff – who have worked extremely hard to turn your ideas into working code, alongside a wide community of volunteers.
Because of you 2018 turned out to be an outstanding year! Here are a few tastes of what we achieved with links to the full details:
Collabora Online improvements
Collabora Online 3.0
In February we had a major release, bringing for the first time the infrastructure necessary to bring many rich dialogs to the browser:
This release also brought change tracking management, a thesuarus, sorting and auto-filtering, IPv6 support, PAM integration, and much more. It formed the base for a series of incremental fix and improvement releases through the year.
Collabora Online 3.1
The key feature in this update, requested by our Asian partners was much improved IME integration:
This release also brought support for chart data series editing, hidden tabs,
Collabora Online 3.2
In April we had an update, that brought chart creation to our existing chart editing functionality into writer, calc and impress, as well as data validation – allowing complex spreadsheet data entry:
We also managed to include context menu spelling correction, column formatting, and a new scripting API for integrators.
Collabora Online 3.3
In June we brought another update that significantly improved clipboard paste – preserving formatting, tables, images and more. Another great win was the ability to paste text as CSV (Comma Separated Values) into Calc:
We also took some time to allow people to set basic conditional formats, borders, and added a no-color option to the drop-down:
We also included responsive design improvements for mobile, as well as options to anonymize document and user names when logging and cleaning up our warning dialogs. We also added the ability to connect a remote monitoring server for better Alfresco locking integration and powerful cluster management. With some more fixes and improvements in a 3.1.1 follow up release
Collabora Online 3.4
In October we brought a major set of improvements with significantly improved interactivity halving typing latency in many cases:
We also improved our mobile experience, impress slide-sorter performance, as well as allowing a configurable web root and other fixes. With a pair of 3.4.1 and 3.4.2 minor releases to further address partner issues.
CODE 4.0 RC1
In December we released a major refresh and upgrade as a base for a Collabora Onine 4.0 release in 2019. This refreshed the look of toolbars with a fresh new look from Colibre:
This included lots of ergonomic improvements, improved shape editing controls with re-sizing previews and a convenient palette to insert shapes. A large number of mobile device improvements were also made – including a stripped-down viewing mode, with auto-hiding, scrollable toolbars, and panning menus. We also added zoom & pan of complex dialogs allowing access to rich desktop functionality on mobile:
Retina / HiDPI display improvements make text look crisp using the browser’s details to render at the display’s real resolution, getting crisp pixel rendering (example at 200% zoom):
Collabora Office 6.0 brings major improvements
Every year, we refresh Collabora Office; our enterprise-grade, long term supported open-source office suite. Collabora Office 6.0 brought a host of new features and interoperability improvements. After all the work on interoperabilty and our creation of an innovative new interoperbility tool: COLEAT, we called Collabora Office 6.0 The Migrator’s Choice.
COLEAT interoperability tool
One of the major problems large enterprises often have is un-documented, legacy line of business applications often written in VB using COM to drive and re-use Microsoft Office. With Collabora Office 6.0 we have created a great new complementary interoperability tool: COLEAT that lets Collabora Office 6.0 act as a drop-in replacement via our compatibility APIs. It also implements a tracing tool to allow easy troubleshooting it complements our work making many more VBA macro driven documents work out of the box.
Several of our partners asked us to improve PPTX interoperability so we invested a chunk of time in improving round-trip fidelity between Powerpoint and Collabora Office, avoiding unnecessary warnings, fixing export of group shapes, export of embedded videos, and preservation of customXML on export. We also implemented PPTM (PPTX with macros) – preserving the VBA streams on export. Other hard to visualize fixes around animations were done too, as well as improving document layout:
Other 6.0 pieces:
In 2018 – we deprecated the GovOffice brand, and made 5 years of support lifetime an option that can be ordered for Collabora Office. We included large numbers of features and fixes which we had implemented for our customers on top of LibreOffice 5.3 as well – from mail-merge, ADMX lock-down improvements, autotext import improvements, SharePoint lists / IQY import and much more.
We continued to implement small new features and fixes on top of 6.0 through 2018 including a built-in MariaDB/MySQL connector, font effect transformations and other VBA and interoperability fixes as well as ongoing security updates. In 2019 we’ll be releasing Collabora Office 6.2 incorporating another round of Collabora and community development by mid 2019.
Collabora Online for bulk Document Conversion
One thing that we tried to encourage this year is the move to using Collabora Online’s built-in REST API for Document Conversion – which can re-use all the efficiency, sharing and security improvements we’ve built into Collabora Online. Good process management of conversions, size limits, timeouts with hard-killing the few processes that mis-behave – all in a friendly package. And of course faster than JODConverter and unoconv too:
We could also enjoy spending the time tweaking various conversions to accelerate specific cases. It is great to be able to focus on specific conversions and squeeze out some low hanging fruit, eg. 5x faster ODT → XHTML
Adding, and using lots of new options such as NoFileSync, NoThumbnail, HiddenForCovnersion, and lazy loading autoformat tables when they’re actually needed.
Adfinis & Collabora bring LibreOffice to iOS
In 2018 thanks to a joint investment with Adfinis to address different customers of ours, we brought Collabora Online to iOS, with lots of interesting details and a pretty picture:
Why not get involved in development using TestFlight and help us meet our goal of a good, Open Source, offline office suite solution in the first half of 2019.
Yet more LibreOffice goodness
Of course, we contribute all of our code changes back to LibreOffice, or
the relevant up-stream project. We love to contribute to and work alongside
the LibreOffice community (infographic). Serving with two seats on the TDF Board and Membership Committee, as well as being Advisory Board members.
We sponsored the LibreOffice conference (summary) and ran a team build event for those of our partners that didn’t mind getting wet:
And also celebrated the 5th birthday of Collabora Productivity, and enjoyed the FLOSS weekly experience:
Thanks to AMD we’ve managed to hugely improve parallel CPU computation of large spreadsheets, and test all available bug documents with both threading and OpenCL to ensure great behavior in all known corner cases. We’ve also re-worked text rendering to avoid lots of redundant re-shaping of the same text – accelerating complex text locales.
Working with SUSE, we have recently started to improve our support for SmartArt where shape fallbacks are missing, and making some progress towards sensible constraint-based layout of diagrams from Office files, follow Miklos’ blog for improvements working towards LibreOffice 6.3.
We’ve also managed to fix large numbers of bugs, and continue to do large scale cleanups of the C++ core to make it easier to develop against – more detail than can fit in what started as a short write-up.
Summary
Just a taste, a few screenshots and some pointers towards more details of what has been achieved. Thank you once again to all who worked with us as partners, customers who funded everything we do, and community who made it fun. We’re looking forward to achieving even more next year, if you’d like to get involved its easy to partner with us, buy from us, or to get involved in the community. And finally – thanks to the whole team that worked so hard to make it all happen.
