Right after celebrating a great LibreOffice 10th Anniversary, we are delighted to present the 2020-version of our LibreOffice growth infoGraphic, including beautiful visuals and interesting numbers! We do hope you appreciate it and would love to hear your feedback. And of course it is great if you find the format, in which it is presented, convenient to share.
Many numbers are again up. Our devs are top code contributors to LibreOffice with 7518 code commits. And the popular “Collabora Online Development Edition” (CODE), for home use & small teams (find details here), has over 50 million Docker image pulls! We are extremely grateful for all partners and customers working with us to make this possible.
Would you like to see the previous versions; these are here: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, & 2014.
Soon there will be the LibreOffice Conference 2020 (October 14 to October 16), where you can meet developers, including of course our developers, and other contributors from the community, and attend the online sessions of the talks of our developers.
So.. check out the updated LibreOffice growth infoGraphic on 2020 here:
Cambridge, August 4th, 2020 – Today we release Collabora Office 6.4 providing businesses and professionals with the best features, interoperability, LTS and custom support in open source while respecting user privacy and company data security. Changes in Collabora Office 6.4 also support new and enhanced features in Collabora Online.
Excellent Interoperability and World Class Support
Collabora Office 6.4 offers excellent interoperability with all major office formats. Import text documents, spreadsheets and presentations from MS Office files or the Open Document Format and save them just as easily. We maintain the world’s largest team of certified LibreOffice developers and offer our customers a long-term supported version of LibreOffice. Version branch 6.4 of Collabora Office will be supported until August 2023 at least.
New Features in Version 6.4
In addition to improving performance and interoperability, Collabora Office 6.4 brings a number of practical improvements to your work. The newly implemented functions can be found all over the suite. The following are some outstanding examples.
Adding Visible Signatures to Existing PDF Files
Collabora Office already had the capability to add a digital signature to an existing PDF file. This still works the same. That signature however is (and was) only visible on the status bar and in file properties; there is no visible signature in the PDF file. Now in Collabora Office 6.4 adding a visible signature has been made possible. You start this new feature by selecting the PDF file with File > Digital Signatures > Sign existing PDF.
One of the very handy and well established features of Collabora Office Writer, is Mail Merge that directly sends out PDF files. In version 6.4 this function has been extended so that you now can send encrypted PDF files. This enhances the privacy options of your workflow. Find more details in our blog.
Encrypt your PDF when sending them with Mail Merge
Padded Numbering Up to 5 Characters
Padded Numbering allows you to work with list numbering using a prefix. This is now possible up to four zeros. The feature that was introduced in an earlier version was limited to prefixes of two zeros.
A Padded Numbering list with a prefix of two zeros in Writer
Set Distance of Shapes to the Bottom of the Page
It can be very handy to specify the vertical position of a shape in text documents by setting the distance at the bottom of the page content area. Until now, this was not possible, although you can do so with the distance at the top of the page content area. If you tried to do the same from the bottom, the shape would be pushed below the margin. Collabora Office 6.4 now fixes this. You can set a negative value for the position to the bottom of the page content area, and the shape will stay in that position. Also when for example the page size is changed, or when other content is added or moved. More details are described in this blog.
Export Larger Pages from Draw using PDF 1.6
Using PDF 1.6, exported PDFs can now be larger than 508 cm (200 inch). Before the size was limited because of the possibilities of the PDF 1.5 specification. Since PDF files from Collabora Office, or more specifically from Draw, can be used to create banners, a limitation of 5 meters only is of course, impractical. More background on this can be found in this blog.
Export large PDF from Draw
Semi-transparent Text in Writer
Collabora Office 6.4 supports semi-transparent text, as it is also supported by Microsoft Word for DOCX files. So this again represents an interoperability improvement. In this blog you can find more details.
Interoperability improvement. Semi-transparent text in Writer
Upstream LibreOffice and more…
Collabora Office is based on the stable LibreOffice branch with extra features and fixes. Collabora Office 6.4 has the capabilities as described in the LibreOffice 6.4 release notes, of which quite some, especially these for our customers, have been introduced in earlier versions of Collabora Office. Of the 6.4 features, quite some have been added by our Collabora Productivity team. As an outstanding example, we feature the Full PDF Export for Spreadsheets.
Full-Sheet Previews option on the PDF Export Dialog
Updates & Security advisories
News on all 6.4-updates are in the release notes. And for security updates, pls check this page.
About
Collabora Office is the LibreOffice-technology based suite for professional, mobile, and online use. Collabora Office 6.4 provides businesses and professionals with the best features, interoperability, LTS and L3 support.
Collabora is privileged to work with so many great contributors to the LibreOffice project and appreciates all the amazing work done by so many that is also included into Collabora Office 6.4. This, our annual release, contains much work that was contributed to LibreOffice 6.3 and then LibreOffice 6.4. These cover all manner of areas from significantly improved filters, performance improvements, 95+% of online features and improvements, rendering along with a powerful redaction feature.
Please do find the full credits here.
Migrate with our demo of Collabora Office 6.4
You can try Collabora Office 6.4 yourself! Just head to the Collabora Office page and request your demo today, or just click the button below.
Cambridge, December 20, 2019 – Today we release Collabora Office 6.2.0 providing businesses and professionals with the best features, interoperability, LTS and custom support in open source as well as respecting user privacy and company data security. Changes in Collabora Office 6.2 also support new and enhanced features in Collabora Online.
The Best of Features, Interoperability, and Support in Open Source
We’ve selected the following of the new possibilities and improvements, available in the new release of our office productivity suite.
Writer 6.2
Better language support and exchange with Word documents including support for bottom-top left-right text direction.
Extended support of the legacy type Microsoft form fields.
Table-size actions involving column/row size now behave more in line with expectations.
There are many improvements in interoperability, of which quite some may look as minor, but that all together make a real difference.
User interface
There is a rich choice in toolbar layouts – a solution for every need and each preference via menu View > User Interface.
Nice and clear new icon sets.
Mobile improvements 6.2
We only mention a few items here: better support for HiDPI displays, improved performance, enhanced Document signing with Verisign.
Most important are a huge amount of improvements that show in better integration on small devices, more powerful features online, better look and user-friendliness. We recommend our information on Android, Apple iOS and CODE 4.2.0 (showing what will be in Collabora Online).
About
Collabora Office 6.2 provides businesses and professionals with the best features, interoperability, LTS and L3 support. Based on upstream LibreOffice 6.2 source code, the project in which we are happy to cooperate and where all our code is contributed, and extended with improvements and backported stable features from newer releases, or features for our customers that are not yet available in the stable upstream branches.
Migrate with our demo of Collabora Office 6.2
You can try Collabora Office 6.2 yourself! Just head to the Collabora Office page and request your demo today, or just click the button below.
Discover and test the new Collabora Online 4.2 features in our regular snapshots!
The next big point release of Collabora Online is approaching. With version 4.2.0 we implement a lot of new features. Be among the first to experience and try them out in our latest snapshot. The quality of new software depends largely on the valuable feedback from users like you. So do you notice anything unexpected? Something does not seem to work as it should? Please be so kind and tell us about it! Your feedback is greatly appreciated. Happy testing!
Some of many new features
The 4.2.0 release of Collabora Online will include many fixes and a lot of new features in terms of design, functionality and usability. The sidebar will see major updates and improve working with documents both from desktop and mobile devices. The list of new functions is long. Here are just a few of the new features already included in the snapshot we would like to point your attention to.
Features
Table manipulation in sidebar
In Collabora Online 4.2 you will be able to access many of the options to manipulate tables in writer documents from a new “Table” panel in the sidebar. You are able to insert and delete columns and rows, merge and distribute cells, adjust height and width.
Handling of hyperlinks
Version 4.2 of Collabora Online brings nice enhancements when working with hyperlinks. Whenever the cursor is located next to or on a link, you will be notified by a dialogue. You can access the linked URL directly from that pop-up window with a single click.
Chart properties in the sidebar
Many chart properties can now be modified from the sidebar. The chart type and various other elements from the chart wizard can now be selected and adjusted there.
Quick / Bottom toolbar
The bottom toolbar has been re-designed. It does now look more appealing, features a new icon design, and enables quick access to the language selection and zoom magnitudes.
Colour pickers
The colour picker has been added for various properties both in dialogs and in the sidebar.
Rich table of contents handling
The dialog with settings for the table of contents is available online now, giving you full control over all the important details while working online.
Powerful new function wizard
The powerful functions wizard now is available for spreadsheets online. Start it, fill in the arguments, investigate the formula’s structure and let the magic happen.
Conditional formatting
Conditional formatting online has been extended enormously. Apart from the direct menu choice, the full options of the dialog now allows you to add (almost) any formatting condition.
Start using and testing the new features
You can get a snapshot of Collabora Office and try it right now – and we love to hear your feedback. Regular updates will be released – so stay tuned!
Effort by Adfinis SyGroup and Collabora bringing open source office to the world of Apple iOS and iPad
For the first time there is a free / open source office suite available on iOS: Collabora Office, thanks to the efforts led by Adfinis SyGroup and Collabora. What started back in around 1992 as the well-known StarOffice, then was OpenOffice.org and now lives on as LibreOffice, is finally available on every relevant platform including (but not limited to) iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Android1, Chrome OS, Windows, Linux and also in the browser.
There is a lot we want to tell you about this first open source office app for iOS. In this blog we write a bit more on the technical part; the blog at Adfinis, has more focus on the interesting history.
But let us first show how it looks!
Collabora Office on iOS for editing spreadsheets.Creating presentations in Collabora Office iOS
Composing texts in Collabora Office iOS.
Get Collabora Office on iOS from the App Store
There are currently two possible ways to get the app:
Download Testflight through the Apple Store and use this link to join:
This will give you the latest releases – which are not fully tested, and available to just try and test
Over the past months, more than 60 versions have been released and the number of improvements and enhancements is for more than a hundred!
Built with online innovation
Collabora Online is built on technological innovation. And on a rich history, starting more than 30 years ago by StarOffice, following OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. We suggest you to read the blog post at Adfinis with interesting details. The innovative part was already mentioned in our first blog post. Collabora Office for iOS is built on the technology that was developed by Collabora to bring LibreOffice to the cloud. An important part of this technology is called LibreOfficeKit. This is a layer allowing to use the LibreOffice we all know on the server side and from there publish documents in the browser. And since LibreOffice is capable of opening the largest possible set of documents, Collabora Online has the same capability in nearly every modern browser!
And there is more that is interesting: the document on the screen is published as tiled images, which means that it doesn’t leave the server, which is especially useful for working online securely. The UI itself, for different platforms, is build with HTML/JS, on top off the VCL, the LibreOffice Visual Class Library. This enables the Collabora app to use many elements of the extensive functionality of LibreOffice’s UI.
A really nice advantage of this approach is that we cover three major scenarios with essentially this one solution:
Android — work in progress, available through the Android Beta channel
This means that future improvements that are implemented for one platform will also benefit the other implementations.
Native look and feel & finger usage
Apple has put a lot of effort into creating great UX guidelines and great GUI widgets for iOS. However, VCL (the GUI toolkit used within the LibreOffice core) was born long before iOS and it doesn’t look and behave like a native iOS app. And even though development took the path of LibreOffice online, a lot of effort was needed in order to make VCL look, feel and behave more like an actual iOS app.
The sidebar makes settings easily accessible
A very important feature to make the app easier to use, is the sidebar. The sidebar contains contextual features and makes good use of the wide screens of the iPads.
Working with tables in text documents.
Including pictures in Writer documents
Selection of cells in a spreadsheet
Finger sized resize and rotate handles
Many tasks can be done with the fingers: resizing or rotating an image, change the size of a row or column in a table, etc.
The whole team has put a lot of effort in developing and testing those things work. And honestly we think that the result is quite nice.
Integrating iOS spellchecker
iOS offers spell checking as part of the basic system functionality. We integrated this functionality into the app. So now Collabora Office on iOS nicely uses the system spell checker in order to eliminate misspelled words!
Spell checking in Collabora Office on iOS
GUI widgets in iOS style
Drop down menus and check boxes have their own style in Apple iOS and so we make the widget in Collabora look similar as much as possible. The result is nice and we’ll try to improve even further. This thanks to the work of for example Collabora developers Szymon Kłos, who wrote a blog post2 about the work of using native widgets in the future, and Tomaž Vajngerl, who gave a presentation about Custom Widget Themes during the LibreOffice Conference 20193 in Almeria.
Rich features in user interface
Handles to select text in iOS style
The text handles look like those of a current iOS app. Currently they behave a bit differently and we work on improving this. That however turns out to be far from trivial.
Selection handles in Collabora on iOS
Inserting pictures through the iOS camera / image gallery
Inserting pictures behaves like in any other app. You can either take a picture with the device camera or select one from your image gallery.
How this helps LibreOffice on Android
As already described above, Collabora leads the effort to use the same approach we use in the iOS app to deliver a new Android app.
During GSOC 2019 Kaishu Sahu did a great job and improved the Android app a lot. Jan Holesovsky (Collabora) is working to improve the situation even further and we should see a public release not too far in the future.
If you’re interested to learn more about the Android efforts or how to join, please contact Collabora.
What’s next for Collabora Office?
While we all work on further improvements, we there are very good reasons to be happy with what has been achieved so far 😉 And of course the good news is that you can experience that yourself.
For the near future, we already have the following things in mind:
Create shiny templates
Implement native widgets / improve UX
Reduce latency
Better support hardware keyboards (and shortcuts)
Fix more rough edges
Make more core features accessible (math formulas, image cropping, …)
Reduce number of needed clicks for simple things (change cell background in a writer table, change text wrap of a picture, …)
Note that these points may change — this list is not a road map!
It’s your turn: you can help to make this better!
If you plan to use LibreOffice in an enterprise environment, whether on the desktop, on Android or on an iPad, we strongly recommend the enterprise ready version offered by Collabora. You’ll enjoy the advantages of an SLA, long-term support and last but not least it is a very good way to enhance the development of things like this iOS app!
Let’s be frank: money is very helpful to further speed up the development. So, if your organization plans to use LibreOffice on iOS (or any other platform) we’re happy to get you on board! Please don’t hesitate to contact Adfinis directly or Collabora Productivity to discuss possible ways to support the development.
Some words of thanks
This fantastic work would not be possible without the strong support and investment of Collabora and Adfinis SyGroup pays. Thanks to the entire crew that works hard every day to provide more free / open source solutions to the people out there!
(1 The Android App is still in Beta. The release is expected later this quarter.
