In the aftermath of this year’s LibreOffice conference, we are glad to provide you with the latest update 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.
Despite the challenges posed by the global pandemic in general, the statistics around LibreOffice collaboration are impressive. Although the total number of contributions to the LibreOffice core has slightly dropped compared to the year before, our developers remain top code contributors to LibreOffice with 4188 code commits (32.3%). The popular Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE), for home use & small teams, saw over 70 million Docker image pulls! We are glad to acknowledge, that the move of Collabora Online to GitHub has resulted in an increased number of contributions from the community. We are truly grateful to the growing number of partners, customers and volunteers for making this work possible.
The number of worldwide Collabora Online partners has raised to 230, the Collabora Office app for Android, iOS and Chrome OS saw 500,000 installations and the last year’s joint online conference by LibreOffice and SUSE did welcome over 130 participants from all over the world.
Would you like to see some previous versions of the info graph? Please find them here: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 & 2016.
So, without further ado, please have a look at the updated LibreOffice growth infoGraphic on 2021 here:
Watch the talks and download the slides of Collabora’s contributions to LibOCon 2021
The LibreOffice Conference 2021 (LibOCon) was held from September 23rd to 25th as an online event. Developers from Collabora have contributed a significant number of talks on various aspects of LibreOffice technology, like interoperability or performance improvements, and regarding Collabora Online and the ecosystem. Did you miss any of those? Don’t worry! The talks are available for you on YouTube. We also encourage you to download the slides of the presentations available in this overview.
Day 1: Thursday, September 23rd, 2021
Michael Meeks: Collabora Keynote
Michael Meeks, Managing Director of Collabora Productivity and member of the LibreOffice Board, looks at the latest developments around LibreOffice from an organizational and ecosystem perspective. See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides!
Noel Grandin: I feel the need… The need for speed…
Optimization is a lengthy process. But also an adventure that requires a bit of detective instinct and plenty of exploratory talent. Discover which adjustments are being made to make LibreOffice even faster and better performing. See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides!
Marco Cecchetti: Some improvements for the SVG export filter
Marco Cecchetti reports on progress around the use of SVG in presentations and the improvements in performance and storage requirements on export. See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides!
Tomaž Vajngerl: Improved document searching with LibreOffice
Collabora developer Miklos Vajna introduces the latest enhancements to LibreOffice and Collabora Online search that visualize hits across different documents. See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides!
Mike Kaganski: Multi-column support in LibreOffice 7.2
The new feature, its relevance, obstacles and implementation status. Mike Kaganski shares his experience, how interesting was it to work on this. See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides!
Day 2: Friday, September 24th, 2021
Cor Nouws: A year of COOL …
Find out about the improvements that LibreOffice technology in the browser experienced. Hear about success stories and new features in Collabora Online! See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides!
Michael Meeks COOL performance
Recently, we have been focusing our Collobora Online development on improving the feel and slickness of document editing. Come and hear about the things that we’ve found and fixed, both in COOL and also in the LibreOffice core to improve the experience! See details
Sarper Akdemir outlines the challenges around the export & import of Footers in PPTX and how they have been mastered. See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides!
Miklos Vajna: Gutter margin in Writer page styles
LibreOffice was already capable of handling various margins in Writer page styles. A missing piece was the support for the gutter margins. Find out, how this was implemented! See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides!
Tomaž Vajngerl: Built-in “Xray” like UNO object inspector
When developing macros and extensions in LibreOffice, it is very useful to have an object inspector. The Document Foundation put up a tender to create a built-in Xray-like UNO object inspector. It was awarded to Collabora, and we are now in the process of implementing it. See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides!
Tomaž Vajngerl: PDF and other graphic improvements
The LibreOffice technology in Draw is key to PDF annotations, and the support of a recently added review-based workflow. Find out, how this has been implemented! See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides!
Day 3: Saturday, September 25th, 2021
Szymon Kłos: JSDialogs improvements over the past year
JSDialogs is a LibreOffice component used to share UI elements with Collabora Online. Hear about the most recent updates added. See details
Watch the talk
Download the slides!
Follow us for more insights on LibreOffice technology
Collabora Productivity created Collabora Online and is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the Cloud. Collabora provides a wide range of products, as well as consulting services for enterprises and governments. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, Collabora is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice Technology codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term support. Collabora’s multi-platform policy is completed with Collabora Office for iOS, Android, and Chrome OS. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing the benefits Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.
An online conference all about LibreOffice technology
Hosted by The Document Foundation, the LibreOffice Conference 2021 (LibOCon) will be an online event. The live-streaming of the talks and workshops will be taking place from September 23rd to September 25th. Collabora developers will give interesting talks on LibreOffice technology, Collabora Online and the ecosystem on all three days, providing profound insights around the latest features and developments. This article gives you an overview of our presentations. Meet us at LibOCon 2021 and just one week later at our COOLdays!
Day 1: Thursday, September 23rd 2021
Michael Meeks
13:00 – 13:30 – Room 1
Collabora Keynote
Michael Meeks, Managing Director of Collabora Productivity and member of the LibreOffice Board, looks at the latest developments around LibreOffice from an organizational and ecosystem perspective.
Optimization is a lengthy process. But also an adventure that requires a bit of detective instinct and plenty of exploratory talent. Discover which adjustments are being made to make LibreOffice even faster and better performing.
Collabora developer Miklos Vajna introduces the latest enhancements to LibreOffice and Collabora Online search that visualize hits across different documents.
Find out about the improvements that LibreOffice technology in the browser experienced. Hear about success stories and new features in Collabora Online!
Recently, we have been focusing our Collobora Online development on improving the feel and slickness of document editing. Come and hear about the things that we’ve found and fixed, both in COOL and also in the LibreOffice core to improve the experience!
LibreOffice was already capable of handling various margins in Writer page styles. A missing piece was the support for the gutter margins. Find out, how this was implemented!
When developing macros and extensions in LibreOffice, it is very useful to have an object inspector. The Document Foundation put up a tender to create a built-in Xray-like UNO object inspector. It was awarded to Collabora, and we are now in the process of implementing it. Hear about the progress!
The LibreOffice technology in Draw is key to PDF annotations, and the support of a recently added review-based workflow. Find out, how this has been implemented!
More interesting talks on LibreOffice technology at the COOLdays
We’re excited to announce the COOL Days 2021 – just one week after the LibOCon. The online conference will take place on September 30th and October 1st and feature a vast range of topics around Collabora Online’s technological and commercial development. The 30th of September – Development Day – is focused on developers to share their experiences. The 1st of October – Business Day – concentrates on commercial topics. Discover the COOL Days program.
The latest version of LibreOffice brings a range of enhancements. Many of the improvements are the result of the work of Collabora developers. We show you a selection of these contributions below, but for a complete overview and full community credits you can checkout the LibreOffice Release Notes.
More attractive Objects with new Blurry Shadows
Shadows used to be rendered as solid copies of objects. The new Blur option adds more realistic shadows to objects. The feature is available through the Shadows tab in the Area dialog or directly through the Sidebar. This feature was developed during a GSoC20 project by Ahmad Ganzouri mentored by the Collaborans Tomaž Vajngerl and Miklos Vajna. Several refinements were implemented by Collabora later on.
Business Ready and Online!
Collabora loves LibreOffice and is glad to be a major contributor to the LibreOffice ecosystem. Of course we offer business ready versions for the desktop – Collabora Office – with LTS and SLA serving your business needs, also to retain control over your ICT.
And for online collaboration, we are leading the development of Collabora Online – built on top of LibreOffice. Get more info or a demo.
Further significant SmartArt improvements
Collabora is constantly adding improvements to the import of SmartArt objects from PPTX. Some of these were already present in Collabora Office 6.4 and also in Collabora Online 6.4. The latest developments by Miklos Vajna are now implemented in LibreOffice 7.1. Find all the technical details in Miklos’ last corresponding blog entry and the one before that.
Much faster Find & Replace
Many of Collabora’s contributions are aimed at enhancing the performance of LibreOffice and Collabora Office. Often this streamlining is the work of Collaboran Noel Grandin. For this release, it has resulted in a 50 percent performance improvement in the Find & Replace function of Writer. Performance improvements in Calc include spell checking, by Dennis Francis, and Autofilter, by Luboš Luňák and Eike Rathke of Red Hat.
Add visible digital signatures to existing PDF files
It is now possible to add visible digital signatures to existing PDF files. Earlier, this had been limited to invisible signatures. We first introduced this feature with the release of Collabora Office 6.4. Find all the technical details for this implementation in Miklos Vajna’s development blog.
NotebookBar now shows preview of Styles
Another new feature, that makes working with styles easier, is the Styles Preview widget that has been added to the NotebookBar. Nice work by our colleague Szymon Kłos.
Many more Contributions
LibreOffice 7.1 includes many more contributions by Collabora. For example: Writer now supports anchoring shapes relative to the bottom of the page; an issue in the formula input box which had occurred in Calc during the freezing of rows/columns was resolved; templates in Writer are now locale-independent; handling of cached field results in Writer has been improved. We would like to say: a big thanks to all our partners and customers helping us to make this work possible! Find out more about all the new features and improvements in the LibreOffice 7.1 Release Notes.
Discover Collabora Office
Collabora Office is the LibreOffice-technology based suite for professional, mobile, and online use. Collabora Office 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. You can test the latest version of Collabora Office yourself! Just head to the Collabora Office page and request your demo today, or just click the button below.
It is a good tradition at the end of the year to reflect on what we have achieved as a team and together with our partners and the community, and remember with gratitude all the hard work that so many have put in.
Of course, this year was marked by the worldwide Corona pandemic. Early during the outbreak, we had published a statement on how far Covid-19 affected our work. Even though our structure – most of our team works remotely from the home office – meant that we were much less affected by difficulties than other companies, we too have friends, colleagues and relatives whose health were affected and also have kids we had to homeschool this year. Nevertheless, this has not affected our customer’s support, and there has been a significant up-tick in interest from people who want to collaborate on their documents without surrendering their data.
Despite all challenges, 2020 has been a very productive year at Collabora. We released important major releases for all our products – Collabora Online actually even saw two major releases, and Collabora Office arrived on Android and Chrome OS. Although conferences have only been possible online since March, we could present ourselves and our work quite well there. By moving to GitHub, a lot of fresh air and many dedicated people got in touch with Collabora Online.
Here is a summary of what we achieved together!
Collabora Online – two major releases, many improvements
The year 2020 saw two major releases of Collabora Online introducing handy new features and substantial UI and UX improvements.
Collabora Online 4.2 brings the feature rich Sidebar
In March, we introduced the Sidebar to Collabora Online 4.2. The versatile Sidebar hosts many of the most used features and provides a much improved user experience for the PC browser.
A version packed with new features
With Collabora Online 4.2 we also introduced an enhanced Colour picker with Conditional Formatting and the Function Wizard in Calc. We also added rich copy/paste, made working with images and tables much more easy and added the possibility to configure the Table of Contents. Find all the details in the Collabora 4.2 announcement.
The new colour picker
The Function Wizard in Calc
Rich table of contents in Writer
Exciting 4.2 updates throughout the year
Many updates followed throughout the year:
April: brought improved PDF handling and support of Asian date formats in Calc in version 4.2.2.
May: Support for dropdown lists in form fields in ODT & DOCX and other text file formats and the handling of tabstops directly on the ruler in version 4.2.3
June: Multiple slide selection on slide pane, handling of tab stops, improved word count on phones and many other features arrive in version 4.2.4
November: It is now possible to edit Chart titles from the Sidebar in Collabora Online 4.2.12
Find all the exciting details in the Collabora Online 4.2 release notes!
Collabora Online 4.2.9: New options in comment threads
Collabora Online 4.2.12: Edit Chart titles from the Sidebar
Collabora Online 6.4 introduces the NotebookBar
In November, we released Collabora Online 6.4. This version introduces the (optional) new NotebookBar with its well-organized tabs and the possibility to collapse it to save space.
Collapse the NotebookBar for more space
This version also included leap in version numbering. This aligned with our desktop version and now reflects more accurately the level of development, since much of the technology is shared by both products.
Collabora Online 6.4 added many new features like the possibility to freeze panes in Calc, many interoperability improvements like, transparent text (in both Impress and Writer) and gradient backgrounds and better SmartArt import in Impress. Find all the details in our announcement.
Freeze rows & columns in Calc
Gradient backgrounds in Impress
Annotations in PDF documents
Collabora Office sees a new major release and powerful updates
In August 2020, we released Collabora Office 6.4. Our business-hardened and long term supported LibreOffice derivative brought a number of practical improvements to the workflow on desktops.
Security, encryption, PDF – new features on the Desktop
Naturally we had back-ported many of the new features to our supported Collabora Office 6.2 release as updates.
Padded Numbering was one of the results of this year’s hack week at Collabora and premiered in Collabora Office 6.2-9. Later this year it became part of Collabora Office 6.4 and LibreOffice.
Collabora Office 6.2-9: Padded numbering
In July, introducing the possibility to send encrypted PDF with Mail Merge, we added a privacy option to Collabora Office 6.2.-21. This also became available in Collabora Office 6.4 and LibreOffice.
Collabora Office 6.2-21: Send encrypted PDF with Mail Merge
Security features and PDF handling are focus topics. The option of adding visible digital signatures to PDF arrived in Collabora Office 6.4 in August.
Collabora Office brings rich editing experience to phones
This is the first time a fully function mobile office suite based on LibreOffice technology became available for Android. We have documented the long road to this point and the many supporters involved in the Collabora Office for Android and iOS credits.
An attractive layout & rich in features
Copy & paste rich text objects
Sheet editing options in context menu
Editing your text file
Editing the content of a presentation
Thanks to the success of our mobile apps, we have expanded the LibreOffice user base by half a million mobile installations, as can be read in our annual LibreOffice infographic.
Collabora Office for Android & iOS 4.2.3: Page setup panel for text files on phones
Collabora Office for Android & iOS 4.2.4: Improved Word count on mobile devices
Collabora Office for Android & iOS 4.2.6: Writer document with different Asian fonts
Trying to open password-protected files on Collabora Office for Android.
Version 6.4 – Another major release for mobile devices
The work on our mobile apps had its climax in the release of Collabora Office 6.4 for Android & iOS in November, which brought new features (e.g. gradient backgrounds, transparent text) from Collabora Online to mobile devices and introduced the NotebookBar to tablets.
Collabora Office for Android & iOS 6.4: The NotebookBar becomes available on tablets
Collabora Office for Android 6.4: The first Darkmode elements are beeing introduced
The Chrome OS version is also available via the Play Store and is now also available as version branch 6.4. Interested in the technical background? Check that out in this talk:
from Jan Holesovsky’s talk “Chrome OS as a new platform” at oSLO2020 available on YouTube
Download the slides of “Chrome OS as a new platform” by Jan Holesovsky at oSLO2020
CODE 6.4 and a growing vibrant community on GitHub
In September, we released the Collabora Online Development Edition 6.4. This showcased all the cool new features, interoperability improvements and the new NotebookBar that would two months later become available in the enterprise edition of Collabora Online 6.4.
Collapsed NotebookBar
Open NotebookBar
Use the hamburger menu to access more options
The release of CODE 6.4 also marked the beginning of our initiative to lower the barriers to join the project. A few weeks later we announced moving the source code of Online to GitHub making it easier for interested people to get involved, and tackling some of the intriguing community marketing problems we faced.
The community rocks
This year we invested a lot of time, effort and passion to make Collabora Online & CODE a more accessible and fun project to work on. We created a forum for users to find support, many easy hacks and assigned developer Muhammed Kara as a community mentor, helping people getting on board. Why are we doing all this? Read about it in our FAQ!
Development Activity on Collabora Online GitHub Repository from November 27, 2020 to December 04, 2020
Regular round-ups and calls
Part of our efforts to grow a vital, transparent and welcoming community are Muhammet’s regular Community Round-ups published on our blog, as well as weekly community calls on Jitsi. We really appreciate all the new contributions we saw coming in this year from so many people, checkout their names & credits in the round-ups.
An engaged team of translators
Want to get involved in another way than contributing code? Join the engaged community of translators over on hosted Weblate to make Collabora Online available in more languages. Thank you to the dedicated team of translators.
2020 has been an excellent year to close new partnerships. We now have can rely on over 200 partners from more than 50 countries, we help each other to promote FLOSS, 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 why not become a partner yourself!
CollaboraOffice.com available in 8 languages
This year, we dedicated a lot of effort to make our website and information about our product available to even more people. At this point collaboraoffice.com is available in English , German , Spanish , French , Traditional Chinese , Italian , Portuguese and Turkish . And we have only just begun…
Updated LibreOffice growth infographic 2020
We also updated our popular LibreOffice growth infographic. With some impressive numbers… Over 200M active LibreOffice users, over 50M pulls from the CODE Docker image, 500K installs of the Collabora Office mobile apps, and over 16K code commits from the whole community to LibreOffice. Have a look at the numbers!
Collabora Online as default in Nextcloud 19
In June, Nextcloud Hub 19 started to ship Collabora Online as the default office application, featuring an easy installation with just a few clicks.
Collabora Online with ownCloud Infinite Scale
In October we announced that Collabora will be integrating Collabora Online with ownCloud Infinite Scale.
Events and conferences 2020 – virtually different
Events were dominated by the global pandemic for most of the year. Sadly there were few opportunities to meet in person.
FOSDEM 2020
In February, FOSDEM 2020 could take place as the last big meeting of the open-source community with many presentations by Collabora developers.
FOSDEM 2020: Download “Bringing Collabora Online to your web app” by Michael Meeks
The LibreOffice conference – this year co-organised by the open SUSE community – took place as an online event. Our team was involved with no less than 15 talks.
oSLO 2020: Download “Bringing The Notebookbar to Online” by Szymon Klos
oSLO 2020: Download “OOXML / PDF Digital Signing in Draw and elsewhere” by Miklos Vajna
oSLO 2020: Download “Implementing Vulkan-capable drawing using the Skia library” by Luboš Luňák
Collabora sponsored an impactful four-day LibreOffice development workshop during the Free Software Winter Camp at Anadolu University in Turkey. We wrote an article about the impressive results. Two participants of the workshop later went on to work GSoC projects for the LibreOffice project.
In summary, it has been a busy year here at Collabora Productivity. This overview only sums up a small part of the great things we have been working on alongside the community. We have advanced our mission to make open-source rock; giving users privacy and businesses control over their data. We not only produced excellent results, but also had a good time working on these things – despite the challenging conditions that 2020 offered. If you’d like to get involved its easy to partner with us, buy from us, or get involved in the growing Collabora Online community. We have lots of plans in the pipeline for 2021 and hope there will be more possibilities to meet in person on conferences and on events. We would like to thank the whole team, particularly our great partners, and customers who make our work possible, and the community of developers and users who make it fun. We look forward to continuing the successful work with you in 2021! Have a very Happy Christmas & a peaceful New Year.
13:00 – 13:30 – Room 1
, German 
, Spanish 
, French 
, Traditional Chinese 
, Italian 
, Portuguese 
and Turkish 
. And we have only just begun…
