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Collabora Office 23.05 Unveils Exciting New Features, Empowering Users with Enhanced Productivity and Interoperability Features

Naomi Obbard Leave a comment

The new Collabora Office 23.05 brings more features, improved performance and increased interoperability

Cambridge, August 7, 2023 – We are happy to announce the new major release of Collabora Office 23.05.

Collabora Office, for Linux, Windows and Mac, is the enterprise version of the world’s most popular open-source office productivity suite, LibreOffice. It is the foundation for new versions of our online collaborative office, Collabora Online, and also powers our apps for iOS, Android and Chrome OS.

The enterprise office suite provides businesses and professionals a richly featured, secure document creation environment with Long-Term Support (LTS) and bespoke development services backed by decades of experience.

Collabora Office’s new release includes new features targeting three key areas: accessibility, interoperability and usability. Below you will find an overview of the exciting new features and improvements that are available in Collabora Office 23.05 and where you can download it.

Accessibility Features

Accessibility features are created to provide comfort to all users, for example, those who prefer to use just a keyboard, those who cannot see the screen very well or those who have impairments.

Dark Mode

Dark Mode has seen over 40 bug fixes and improvements and further support for switching between dark and light mode manually.

To toggle dark mode on and off:

Along the top navigation bar select: Tools → Options

Collabora Office → View → Appearance Mode: “System”, “Light”, “Dark”
Toggle between light and dark mode

Interoperability Features

For some time, users and organizations have faced a major challenge when trying to find an alternative to Microsoft’s widely-used productivity suite: the issue of file compatibility and interoperability. These improvements continue to build on our already solid base of excellent interoperability and are fully compatible across both the desktop and online versions of Collabora Office.

Document Themes

Document themes are predefined formatting settings that you can apply to a whole document to easily change and re-purpose its appearance, add your own branding and give it a consistent feel. They usually include a combination of specific colours and fonts for heading, subheadings and body text. When the formatting is changed within the theme, it will change across all parts of the document following that formatting.
Themes also allows the user to choose between multiple default looks of objects when inserting and changing, which are derived from the current theme.

To apply a document theme:

Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme’
Select the theme you’d like to apply
Press ‘Ok’

To create a document theme

Select on the top bar ‘Format → Theme → Add’

From here you can define colours for each part of your document.

Change and customise your Document Theme via a dialog box

Multi-page Floating Tables in Writer

This new feature is a combination of two existing capabilities. Multi-page tables and floating tables. Multi-page tables are tables than span their content over more than one page. Floating tables are tables inside a floating frame. This allows you to wrap text around them, which is particularly useful for brochures. Previously, it was not possible to combine these two features.

Floating frames used to work only on a single page. Now you can create floating tables that span across multiple pages. It improves interoperability with Microsoft’s OOXML format. It also significantly improves interoperability with tables that have been accidentally floated by users in Microsoft Office – often by just adjusting table sizing and positioning. This is frequently a problem in mis-designed Government forms – where tables are used for rendering borders, these should render and be editable with this update.

If you are interested in the complex technical challenges behind this feature, we encourage you to take a look into the series of posts by developer Miklos Vajna. There’s also a very insightful talk presented at COOL Days 2023 on YouTube. This feature is is still under active development, with some minor issues on specific use-cases to be ironed out, but you can make use of it in Collabora Office 23.05 now.

Multi-page Floating Tables in Collabora Office 23.05

Compact View of Pivot Tables

Pivot Tables are a flexible and powerful analysis tool for mixed data sets. Collabora Office can create and import Pivot Tables. The feature had first been introduced to in early 2021 together with numerous statistical tools. Meanwhile, the feature has seen further interoperability improvements. Collabora Office Calc is now able to preserve the more recent default compact Pivot Tables created in Excel. In addition to the more accurate visual representation, this improvement also avoids incorrect cell references.

Multi-Stop Gradients

Exciting improvements have been made to the under-the-hood renderer! Our rendering engine has been enhanced and can now handle even more complex gradients. You can now turn up the visual appeal of your document by incorporating multi-stop gradients into shapes, borders, and other elements. This update is essential for anyone who works with intricate graphics – bringing improvements and better interoperability for existing documents and making it easier to edit more complex designs and graphics.

Improved Frame Anchoring and Position

Collabora Office 23.05 includes improved compatibility with older document-framing descriptions including better positioning for frame handling, better support for combining/splitting frames and overlapping frames, fixes to some cases where parent styles were ignored, and fixes to avoid UI anchor changes that caused movement on the page.

64-bit Zip Support

The Zip64 standard extends numerous internal limitations in the XLSX and ODS formats used to compress documents. While the old zip limitations are enough for most practical user cases, documents with enormous amounts of content embedded could occasionally run into such limits. With support for Zip64 included in 23.05, editing and working with huge spreadsheets is now possible in Collabora Office. Zip64 also serves as a replacement – replacing the older standard for smaller files.

Zip64 support makes for exciting news for all, whether you’re a pro handling massive documents or a casual user who will surely benefit from the interoperability improvements! Everyone can expect improvements across the board.

Usability

Keyboard Navigation through Forms

You can use the tab key to circularly navigate through content controls and fieldmarks. The modern content controls have a tabIndex field, which allows for precise ordering of keyboard navigation. The tabIndex also allows a control to be skipped – which is useful to avoid getting stuck in rich text controls (since the tab key needs to insert a tab character in that case). Form developers can specify the tabIndex via the content control properties UI.

Navigate easily through forms using the tab key

Page Number Wizard

A wizard dialogue box has been added, combining inserting the required headers, footers, and page number fields into a single, easy to use, familiar dialog for users. This features all the common alignment options, support for a variety of languages, and a preview.

Simply select ‘Insert → Page Number...’

and you will see a dialogue box appear which enables you to customise the positioning, alignment and style of page numbers, along with a preview. There are a variety of supported languages available.

To remove page numbers, simply delete the page number in one of the footers and it will remove the page numbers on all pages.

Insert page numbers with the new Page Number Wizard

Other New Features

  • New ‘plain text’, ‘combo box’ and titles and tags options in Content Controls.
  • Added support to open multi image TIFF files.
  • Auto fitting text scaling algorithm has been changed so it works similar to MS Office.
  • Categorized link targets when linking to a presentation.

Community

Collabora has invested significantly in bringing a host of new features and functionality to this latest release and contributes a vast majority of the Collabora Office code. However, we want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues in the wider LibreOffice community who helped to contribute not only to this, but also to the underlying LibreOffice Technology upon which Collabora Office, CODE and Collabora Online are built.

All of our code is open source and available to the public on GitHub. Join the Collabora Online Community, take part in easy hacks and discussions in the forum.

Here are some new features contributed by the LibreOffice community.

Typographical Editing

New optional hyphenation settings are available to give rules for adjusting text flow. You can now limit hyphenation within paragraphs, set a minimum word length for hyphenation and opt to not hyphenate the last word of a paragraph.

This work was done by László Németh, NISZ.

Typographical Editing Options

Change Tracking in Numbered Lists

When making changes within numbered lists, the numbering has now been fixed to show actual and original numbers within the document.

Example of new change tracking in numbered lists

Table Style Design Support

You can now modify table styles and create new ones in Impress and Draw. Modified styles are saved into documents, and can be shared via templates. You can access this function by right-clicking on a design in the Table Design Sidebar panel.

This work was done by Maxim Monastirsky.

Table Design Options in the Sidebar

Other community wins include:

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity is a leading provider of innovative software solutions, catering to the needs of individuals and businesses worldwide. With a focus on usability, performance, and security, Collabora Office and Online empower users to accomplish their goals efficiently and effectively.

Collabora Office is the latest enterprise release of our desktop office suite based on LibreOffice Technology, for professional, mobile, and online use. Collabora Office 23.05 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 outstanding work done by so many that is included into Collabora Office 23.05. Our annual release, contains code that was contributed to LibreOffice 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6. For a deep dive on all details and credits, please do take a look at the release notes.

It’s easy to migrate to Collabora Office 23.05 or try Collabora Office 23.05 for yourself! Just head to the Collabora Office page and request your demo today, or download on the Windows or Mac App store.

If you would like to help test out the very latest Collabora Office versions before official release, you can download the development snapshots.

 

Try the Demo

 

Get on the Windows Store  Get on the Mac App Store

Six Reasons Why Collabora Online is the Best Microsoft Office Alternative

Richard Brock 2 Comments

Microsoft Office has led the office productivity market for many years, but is now no longer the only option for your online document editing. Collabora Online is perfect for businesses who are looking for a modern and secure workspace.

Here are six reasons why Collabora Online is the best Microsoft Office alternative:

1. Excellent interoperability with major (and minor) file formats

If you can’t work with the files, then you aren’t much use as a file editor. Fortunately Collabora Online provides excellent interoperability with a wide range of file formats. DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, we’ve got you covered. In actual fact, we have greater interoperability between our online and offline editor than even Microsoft’s desktop and online editors offer (more about this coming in a future post, watch this space!). So rest assured, you’ll still have access to that legacy Microsoft Works file you still have lying around. Got an unusual client who likes everything sent to them in .docm? Not a problem. Need to import a FlatXML spreadsheet? With Collabora Online, you’ll have all the interoperability you need for your modern, or indeed legacy working environment!

2. Digital security and sovereignty

Collabora Online offers distinct advantages over Microsoft Office from a digital sovereignty perspective. First and foremost, Collabora Online is an open-source solution, providing transparency and giving organizations full control over their software stack. This allows users to verify and modify the source code, ensuring data privacy and security. Additionally, unlike Office 365 which operates on a cloud infrastructure managed by a single provider, Collabora Online can be deployed on-premise or in a private cloud, enabling organizations to maintain complete sovereignty over their data. This level of control enables full compliance with data protection regulations and safeguards against unauthorised access. By choosing Collabora Online, you can prioritise your digital autonomy and protect your data.

3. Collaborate effectively with anyone you chose

The clue’s in the name! Collabora Online allows you to collaborate, co-edit, review and track changes, add comments, and share your documents securely. Furthermore, Collabora Online gives you a whole range of security and permission settings, enforced server side, to ensure your data and the content of your documents, is always protected.

4. Great platform availability and ease of use

Whether you’re a Mac, Windows or Linux user, or you like to edit on desktop, mobile or your favourite modern browser, Collabora Online is available to offer you freedom of choice. Also, unlike the familiar alternatives, our browser-based and desktop applications have full interoperability since they share a common codebase. No more glitches when you try and edit that slide show online that you just had on your laptop.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, and with Collabora Online you won’t have to. With a familiar user-friendly interface, you’ll feel right at home and can skip costly retraining that might come with other alternatives.

5. No more vendor lock-in

Have you noticed the inexorable rise of Microsoft’s pricing structure, or new changes nobody asked for? We certainly have. Break free from vendor lock-in with Collabora Online! Unlike other tech giants, with Collabora Online you’re not tied to any one service provider. Integrate our secure office suite into your own solution and infrastructure, or with any of our 200+ partners, paying for as many services as you require. Want to switch to a hybrid cloud solution or fully on-premise down the line? Not an issue with Collabora Online.

6. Exciting Community Spirit

Did you know that by joining Collabora Online, you’re joining a huge community? Collabora Online was born out of the open-source world, long before crowdfunding or crowdsourcing was a thing, and we’ve stayed true to our roots. Alongside Collabora Online, we also offer Collabora Online Development Edition (or CODE for short) allowing everyone to enjoy the latest features and provide feedback. This vibrant and engaged community fosters a collaborative environment where users, developers, and enthusiasts come together to contribute, share knowledge, and drive the evolution of Collabora Online. The CODE community offers an opportunity to help others through forums, mailing lists, and dedicated channels. Furthermore, this community-driven ecosystem provides opportunity for contribution to the enhancement and expansion of Collabora Online’s features, compatibility and performance, giving you access to a support network and bespoke solutions Microsoft Office users can only dream of.

We could go on, but suspect you’re getting the message. Collabora Online is the best alternative to Microsoft Office, and if you ask us, is better than the current market leaders. Try the demo today at: https://col.la/getonline

Collabora Office 22.05 brings features, performance wins, and excellent Interoperability

Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

The new Collabora Office 22.05 brings improved performance and better interoperability

Cambridge, May 30th, 2022 – Today we are pleased to announce the availability of the new major release of Collabora Office. With improved interoperability, better performance, and new features we can enhance the productivity of all users. Collabora Office, for macOS, Windows and Linux, is an enterprise version of the world’s most popular open-source office productivity suite LibreOffice. It is the foundation for new versions of our online collaboration suite Collabora Online, and also will power our apps for iOS, Android and Chrome OS.

The whole suite offers businesses and professionals the best features, interoperability, Long-Term Support (LTS), and bespoke development services in open source, while respecting users privacy and corporate data security. For news and improvements in the consecutive updates, check this release notes page.

“Jumbo Spreadsheets” with 16k columns in Calc

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

A frequently requested feature is that Calc in Collabora Office now supports up to 16384 columns in spreadsheets. This is a sixteenfold increase in the maximum number of columns compared to previous versions. This capability was previously available as an experimental feature, but with the current fine-tuning, it is now available to all users by default. Previously, Calc would display an error message on opening large sheets and crop the data in the extra 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. If you are interested in the technical details, we recommend you take a look at Luboš Luňák’s developer blog. 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 are now available in Calc

Sparklines for Calc have arrived in Collabora Office 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.

All three types of Sparklines displayed horizontally and vertically

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.

Word-style border fixes available for pages, tables and paragraphs in Writer

Improved rendering of Word-style borders for pages, tables & paragraphs in Collabora Office 22.05 Writer

In Collabora Office 22.05 we have been looking at Writer and how it can better render Word-style borders around pages, tables and paragraphs. Word users expect to be able to import their documents to Writer and have a rendering that is true to the original. A series of fixes to the way page, table, and paragraph borders of OOXML documents are imported into and painted in Writer meets this desire. This is done conditionally, so existing ODF documents are left unchanged. As a result of this work, Writer now has a set of improvements to better render Word-style borders around pages, tables and paragraphs. Thank you to Docmosis and TUBITAK for making this work by Collabora possible. Find out more about the technical background in Miklos Vajna’s development blog.

Linked paragraph and character styles arrive in Writer

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With the release of Collabora Office 22.05 Writer has now the ability to handle linked character styles and paragraph styles from Word documents. This improves interoperability and may improve the style previews and the UI of future releases. Earlier, links were lost on round-trips between Writer and Word which led to unwanted displays inside the style pickers. This work was made possible thanks to Docmosis. Find more details in the developer blog.

Adding links to shapes in Writer

It is now possible to add links to shapes in Writer

The latest version of Collabora Office introduces the ability to add hyperlinks to shapes in Writer. This option was previously only available in spreadsheets and presentations, but not in text documents. At the same time, links in shapes were previously also lost when importing Word documents, so this feature also improves interoperability. To make use of this feature, simply select a shape and choose the hyperlink symbol from the GUI. Editing of exiting hyperlinks is also possible through the right-click dialog. Many thanks to our ecosystem partner allotropia for implementing this.

Improved shadows for tables in presentations

The interoperability of transparent shadows in tables saw further improvements in Collabora Office 22.05

The way Impress handles shadows in tables saw additional refinements. Now it correctly renders shadows for table shapes, even if the shadow itself or the fill of the table cells have transparency. This is another enhancement of the compatibility with Microsoft’s PowerPoint with regard to the support of transparency in table cell fills and table shadows. We’d like to thank our partner SUSE for making this improvement possible, find more details in Miklos Vajna’s developer blog.

New PowerPoint-compatible screen sizes available in Impress

New PowerPoint-compatible screen sizes available in Writer

A few new PowerPoint-compatible screen sizes have been added to the Paper Format options inside the Slide Properties. The “Widescreen” option is currently used in PowerPoint, while the different “On-screen Show” options are used in previous versions of PowerPoint and Google Slides. Any exported file created with these sizes will be treated as a preset size (as opposed to a user size). The same applies on import. Thank you to Jun Nogate for the work on this!

Many performance improvements across all modules

In addition to improving interoperability, one of the main areas of activity for Collabora engineers is the continued improvement of performance. In the new main version of Collabora Office, significant performance improvements can be found in all modules, which were achieved by streamlining the code. For example:

  • The export speed of complex PDF documents has increased in Writer
  • The load speed of large RTL documents was improved in Writer
  • The rendering speed of complex Writer document has increased
  • Calculation performance improvements for Calc
  • Improved opening speed of XLSM & XLSX files
  • Improved inserting speed of large Charts in Calc
  • Improved speed of lookup functions in Calc
  • Improved speed for auto-filtering in Calc
  • Improved use of threads for calculations in Calc
  • Improvements on shape rendering in Impress & Draw

About Collabora Office

Collabora Office is based on LibreOffice technology for professional, mobile, and online use. Collabora Office 22.05 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 outstanding work done by so many that is included into Collabora Office 22.05. This, our annual release, contains much work that was contributed to LibreOffice 7.3 and then LibreOffice 7.4, for a deep dive on detail and credits, please do peruse these. It’s easy to migrate to Collabora Office 22.05. You can try Collabora Office 22.05 yourself! Just head to the Collabora Office page and request your demo today!

Try the Demo

Thanks to the community!

Collabora has invested significantly in bringing many new features and functionality to this latest release, and accounts for a significant volume of contributions. However, we want to acknowledge all of our friends and colleagues who helped to contribute to this and the upstream LibreOffice technology. Find the details in either the release notes above or the LibreOffice community credits. We cannot thank everyone involved enough for their passionate work! LibreOffice is a friendly community offering many ways to get involved. Alternately, if you are interested in joining the Collabora Online community, you will find several easy ways to started inside our community hub – we look forward to
welcoming you.

Collabora Online Powers Diagrams in ownCloud 10.9

Marc Rodrigues Leave a comment

New Frontend and Diagrams in ownCloud 10.9

The latest version of ownCloud Server brings various performance improvements, including significantly speeding up how ownCloud clients examine the contents of user accounts. This is especially beneficial for those users with a lot of files and large directory structures. The update has also introduced a new frontend. The “richdocuments” extension of Collabora Online supports both the old and new frontend and integrates flawlessly into either of them. At the same time, a new document type has been introduced. The ownCloud Server can now open and edit Diagrams.

Using Diagrams with ownCloud & Collabora Online

The use of the new Diagram file type is very straightforward. Below we are describing how to create a Diagram from scratch inside the new and the old interface and how to edit exiting Diagrams through the ownCloud server web interface.

Accessing documents with Collabora Online from ownCloud’s new frontend

Create or Open a Diagram in the Old Frontend

To create a new diagram inside the old web frontend, simply click the plus icon within the folder navigation above the file list. In addition to the familiar document types (word processing, spreadsheet & presentation), you will now also notice an orange Diagram option. Select this to open an empty diagram document. Diagrams are displayed in a light orange icon and include the extension .odg in their file name. Existing Diagrams will be opened through a click on the file.

Create or Open a Diagram in the New Frontend

The handling within the new frontend is very similar. The new web interface includes an updated new button over the file listing. Click it and choose the new Diagram option to start a Diagram from scratch inside the current folder. Diagrams are also displayed in a light orange icon and include the extension .odg in their file name. Existing Diagrams will be opened through a click on the file or through a context menu that opens with a right-click.

A Diagram opened in Collabora Online 21.11

Edit Diagrams with Collabora Online and ownCloud

Diagrams can also be created outside ownCloud and Collabora Online using Collabora Office Draw or LibreOffice Draw. Diagrams offer a variety of options to edit documents with (vectorized) graphics, shapes, text, FontArt and the smart connector tool that has been introduced in Collabora Online 6.4.8. Furthermore, it is of course possible to work with tables and charts. Diagrams is suitable for creating print products such as flyers or posters, but also organigrams, flow charts or technical drawings. Working within the Diagrams module is very intuitive as it is similar to the approach of creating a presentation in Impress. Further information on the range of functions can be found in the Draw online help.

Discover Collabora Online and ownCloud

Collabora and ownCloud are proud to offer a combined commercial solution including Collabora Online. Based on the LibreOffice technology core, we continue to develop this functionality in response to the evolving needs of our customers. Find out more and request your free demo.

 

 

About ownCloud

ownCloud develops and provides open-source software for content collaboration, allowing teams to easily share and work on files seamlessly regardless of device or location. Hundreds of millions of users worldwide already use ownCloud as an alternative to public clouds – and thereby opt for more digital sovereignty, security and data protection. Find more information online at owncloud.com or follow @ownCloud on Twitter.

About Collabora Online

Collabora Online 21.11 is our latest enterprise-quality release. It’s 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. Collabora Online integrates flawlessly into Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, and many of the major file sync & share, groupware and hosting solutions. It’s ideal for organisations 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 hello@collaboraoffice.com. Keep up to date on all latest developments by following us on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or Mastodon.