The next major release of Collabora Online Development Edition is here!

This release brings major improvements with AI-assisted workflows, new editing features, smarter document review, ever-improving document interoperability, accessibility, and of course everyday user experience.

Writer gains smarter review tools, Markdown workflows, easier style access and better navigation for long documents. Calc adds per-user sheet views, more modern functions, table styles, calculated pivot functions with improved filtering and dropdown behaviour. Impress continues to improve collaborative presenting, introduces slides section support, and gets better font embedding. The wider user interface benefits from accessibility work, more flexible dark mode, better settings, sharper PDF rendering, and more flexible document opening behaviour.

Whether you are a developer or open-source enthusiast, using CODE at home or in a small team, CODE 26.04 is packed with improvements that make document editing more capable, more intuitive, and more flexible. Let’s dive into what’s new.

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Smarter workflows. Powerful data. AI integration.

Collabora Online Development Edition is perfect for small teams, home users, and early adopters looking to explore the latest capabilities. While ideal for testing and development, it is not intended for production environments as it often includes exciting new, but less mature features for people to play with. 

Once thoroughly tested in CODE, new features are moved to Collabora Online (COOL), Collabora Productivity’s open source document editing and collaboration solution with professional service-level agreements (SLA) and technical support. COOL is designed for integration into an organisation’s infrastructure and integrated into many partner collaborative platforms. COOL 26.04 will be available in the coming weeks.

AI Integration in Writer

Writer now benefits from new AI-powered assistance, helping users with tasks such as text suggestions, improvements, and other writing-oriented workflows. This opens the door to faster drafting, easier refinement, and more efficient document creation directly within Collabora Online.

Whether you are polishing internal reports, improving clarity in customer-facing documents, or simply trying to work faster, an AI integration makes Writer more helpful without taking you out of your document workflow.

Compare Writer Documents – Richer document comparison for serious review workflows

Reviewing changes between document versions is now much more powerful. Users can easily compare the current document with an earlier version, from server or as local document, and view insertions, deletions, moved text, images, and tables as colour-coded redlines, complete with author and date details.

This makes it far easier to understand what changed, who changed it, and when, especially in contracts, policy documents, technical documentation, and other high-value review processes.

Changes between versions of a document can be viewed either side-by-side, or using the standard tracked changes dialog.

Multi-Page View in Writer – Easier navigation across long documents

Long-document editing and review is now more comfortable with Multi-Page View in Writer. By showing two pages side-by-side, this feature makes it easier to navigate, review layout, and understand document structure at a glance.

Whether working on reports, manuals, or complex formatted documents, users can now move through content more naturally and with better context.

Redesigned Comment Cards – Clearer, more modern collaboration

Comments have been refreshed with a more modern and readable card design, making it easier to interact with comments, or see at a glance which questions have been resolved.

For teams spending long periods reviewing shared documents, these small usability improvements matter. Better comment presentation means less friction, less visual clutter, and a smoother review experience overall.

Smarter Writer Change Tracking & Reinstate Improvements

Tracked changes are now more intelligent and robust, especially where edits depend on one another. This improves reliability in more demanding review workflows, where accepting or rejecting one change can affect others nearby.

Together with reinstate improvements, this makes review cycles more predictable and better suited to real-world collaborative editing.

Writer Review Toolbar Reorganisation – Better access to key review actions

The Review tab has been reworked, while command buttons were added for new features, important actions such as comments and spellcheck are easier to reach and behave better in tighter toolbar space.

It is a practical but important improvement: the tools people need most during review are now easier to find, faster to use, and better organised across screen sizes.

Writer Navigator Search – Faster movement through complex documents

The Writer Navigator now includes search, showing all results and making it much quicker to jump around long or structured documents.

For users working with headings, sections, objects, or large reports, this turns the Navigator into a more powerful tool for orientation and movement rather than just a static outline.

Writer Style Sidebar Previews – More visual control over formatting

The style sidebar now provides richer previews instead of a simple scrolling list. This makes it easier to identify and apply the right style quickly, especially in documents with many different styles.

For anyone trying to keep formatting consistent across a document, better previews help reduce guesswork and improve confidence. Users can create new styles based on a selection or other style and reuse them in the document.

Markdown Support

Writer now supports Markdown import and export, making it easier to move between document editing and documentation-oriented workflows. This is especially useful for users working across publishing, technical writing, developer documentation, or mixed office and text-based environments. It is also extremely useful for including AI generated styled text, which is often in Markdown format.

Markdown conversion can also now use a template document, giving API and SDK users more control over the styles of branded and structured output. This is a particularly useful improvement for integrators and developers building automated document workflows, where consistent layout and styling matter just as much as the content itself.

It also makes it extremely easy to apply lots of the power of Collabora Office’s document layout functionality to the problem of printing beautiful Markdown.

PDFs with Comments as annotations or in margin

In addition to creating a PDF with comments as annotations, PDF export in Writer now supports including comments in the margin, which is especially useful in review and approval workflows, or when printing hard copies.

Instead of losing discussion context at export time, users can now carry comments through into the PDF when needed for external review, sign-off, or archiving.

Better Screen Space Usage

Default document position and zoom level are now more flexible and calculated to use screen space more effectively, taking into account also Navigator, Sidebar and comments.

That means less wasted space, better defaults, and a more comfortable first impression when opening documents across different devices and display sizes.

AI Integration in Calc

Calc now also benefits from AI-powered assistance, helping with tasks such as analysing spreadsheet data and troubleshooting formula errors.

For users dealing with complex spreadsheets, this can make formula work less intimidating and data analysis more approachable, especially for occasional spreadsheet users who still need powerful results.

Per-User Spreadsheet View

It is now possible for individual users working collaboratively on shared spreadsheets to create their own sheet view and apply filters or see columns or rows according to their own preferences, without affecting others. This enables teams to work collaboratively on spreadsheets filtering for different variables at the same time, without disrupting someone else’s workflow.

Spreadsheeting: handle formula errors elegantly

To help users diagnose and fix formula errors, a floating exclamation mark now appears next to cells with any errors, opening a menu with different options to help users to inspect, edit and fix the formula.

Pivot Tables Calculated Values

Pivot tables aren’t new, but 26.04 introduces support for calculated values in Calc pivot tables, adding an easy way to deal with pivot tables where the desired values may not be in the spreadsheet directly, but those values can be calculated from the spreadsheet data.

This means users are now able to create calculated columns in the pivot table.

Calc Table Styles – Faster formatting, better interop

Calc now includes ready-made table styles with light, medium, dark, and custom themes, including options like banded rows, headers, and totals.

This not only speeds up formatting but also improves interoperability with other editors for .xlsx files, helping spreadsheets preserve expected table styling more accurately across environments.

Work is under way to fully support this feature also for .ods files.

Smarter Dropdown Lists in Calc

Dropdown list controls in spreadsheets have been improved to behave more intuitively.

These kinds of small interaction improvements add up quickly in spreadsheet work, especially when forms, validation, or structured data entry are involved.

New Calc Functions – More modern spreadsheet capability

Calc adds newer spreadsheet functions including CHOOSECOLS, CHOOSEROWS, DROP, EXPAND, HSTACK, TAKE, TEXTAFTER. TEXTBEFORE, TEXTSPLIT, TOCOL, TOROW, VSTACK, WRAPCOLS, WRAPROWS.

These functions make it easier to reshape, extract, and work with data in more modern ways, while also improving compatibility with spreadsheets created elsewhere.

Coloured tabs

You can now right-click a sheet tab, choose Tab Colour, and assign a colour. This is saved in the file and remains interoperable, so the coloured tabs can be read by other software and imported from third-party files.

AI Integration in Impress

AI support in Impress helps users create presentations more efficiently, from early research through to slide preparation. It can help verify and summarise information, convert paragraphs into presentable bullet points, and turn rough ideas into clearer presentation content that is easier to shape into slides.

This is especially useful when starting from longer source material such as reports, notes, or briefing documents, making it faster to build structured, audience-friendly presentations while leaving the final review and design decisions in the hands of the presenter.

Present to All / Follow-Me Slideshows – More reliable collaborative presenting

Collaborative presentations are now more interactive. The presenter starts a presentation, and it can automatically begin for the viewers. Their view will update automatically as the presenter steps to the next slides. If a viewer wants, they can stop the follow mode and independently scroll back within the presentation (asynchronous mode). This enables presentation viewers to check back through slideshows for information they may have missed or want to reference quickly, before returning to the presenter’s view. The presentation viewer cannot go ahead of the leader.

For classrooms, remote training, guided walk-throughs, or just regular boardroom presentations, this means a more advanced presentation experience for all.

Multiple Slide Sizes in One Presentation

Presentations can now contain slides of different sizes in the same file. This gives users more flexibility in building mixed-format presentations, especially where content from different sources, templates, or display formats needs to live together.

This is especially useful when viewing complex PDFs that contain mixed page sizes, where preserving the original layout matters – rather than forcing everything into a single uniform format.

Slide Grouping into Sections

ODP presentations now support overview pages, enabling a more flexible presentation structure with slides organized into sections.

This can be useful for navigation, summaries, and more dynamic presentation design, particularly in longer or more complex slide decks.

Interop

We continue to make great progress in improving our already excellent OOXML file format interoperability, ensuring documents created with Microsoft Office can be opened, rendered, saved, and then returned to a Microsoft Office work environment without loss in data or functionality. This includes implementing new features, and making changes to our rendering engine to stay in line with Microsoft’s behaviour.

Over the past year we have been focusing on validity testing of about 243,000 documents, spreadsheets and presentations in various formats converted to the corresponding OOXML format, with the goal of getting to zero. The following chart shows the progress over the last few months for text documents and presentations.

Arguments suggesting that because we encourage usage of ODF, we must therefore not be appropriate for use with .docx or .xlsx are poor and don’t stand up to scrutiny. Just because we’re great at ODF doesn’t stop us being great at interop too!

Menu Bar Grouping and Tooltips

Notebookbar tabs and overflow behaviour have been improved with better grouping, labels, and dropdown handling to better fit the screen.

This helps the interface stay clearer and more usable, especially as features continue to grow, and users work on varying screens sizes.

Additionally, notebookbar tabs now have tooltips to describe more clearly what a feature does.

In-App Settings Dialog

An in-app settings dialog has been added, meaning users can edit application settings usually found in the EFSS administration settings directly from the document editor interface, avoiding having to go to the integrator’s interface.

That means less hunting for dictionary, document signing, display and dark mode settings, easier changing of AI model settings, and a smoother overall experience when configuring the editor.

Filter Fonts by Typing

In the Tabbed UI, users can now filter fonts by typing part of the font name directly into the font dropdown.

It is a simple quality-of-life improvement, but one that saves time constantly for anyone working with formatting.

Toggle Status Bar Visibility

To provide users with more control over their interface, we implemented a right-click context menu in the status bar to allow users to manually show/hide specific indicators based on their preferences.

Save Images from Docs

In 26.04, you can quickly and easily download graphics from documents. Simply right click an image, and choose to save it. This is useful in many cases where documents are to be ‘transposed’ into a new medium, for example uploading blog posts with images onto a website.

The post CODE 26.04 Release appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

The next major release of Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) is here! This release focuses on automation, security, and precision, introducing key improvements like Autotext for faster document creation, eID Easy for secure PDF signing, and a new Presenter Console in Impress. Spreadsheet users will benefit from improved UX, new functions, and a smarter Autofill experience, while developers and sysadmins get more flexibility with Rootless Containers, WOPI troubleshooting tools, and new file format support.

Whether you’re a developer, open-source enthusiast, using CODE at home or in a small team, CODE 25.04 is packed with innovations that help you work more efficiently – while staying in control of your data. Let’s dive into what’s new!

Try the FREE Demo

Get Involved!

Collabora Online Development Edition is perfect for small teams, home users, and early adopters looking to explore the latest capabilities. While ideal for testing and development, it is not intended for production environments as it often includes exciting new, but unstable features for people to play with. For this we offer our fully supported product, Collabora Online. Collabora Online 25.04 will be available in the coming weeks.

Autotext & Custom Dictionaries – Save and reuse text snippets

Tired of retyping the same phrases, boilerplate text, or technical terms? With Autotext in Collabora Online, you can save and instantly reuse common snippets, streamlining your document creation process. Whether it’s standard replies, legal clauses, or frequently used expressions, Autotext helps you work smarter, not harder. Combined with the new Custom Dictionaries feature, you can ensure industry-specific terminology, names, or specialized words are always recognized—reducing typos and improving consistency. Say goodbye to repetitive typing and hello to a faster, more efficient writing experience!

Learn more about configuring Autotext from our recent Tea Time Training video.

With thanks to ZenDiS for helping fund this update.

Comments Improvements

With support from the Open Source Initiative (OSI), we have improved our comment system in Writer, making it easier to collaboratively review documents, especially with larger comments or longer comment threads – showing parent-child relationships clearly, expanded comment views, @ing users in comments and quicker shortcuts such as Ctrl+Enter to save a comment, and enabling the direct copying of text from comments.

Styles Sidebar with Spotlight

Creating professional, polished documents has never been easier! The enhanced Styles Sidebar in Collabora Online now features a Spotlight mode, allowing you to visually highlight each style within your document. This makes it effortless to check, refine, and ensure consistent formatting throughout—perfect for producing high-quality reports, proposals, or academic papers. No more hunting through menus or guessing which style is applied—just clear, instant visibility and control over your document’s appearance.

Navigation Sidebar

In another UI update aimed at improving productivity and reducing the need to switch views – our Navigation Sidebar is now accessible from a small compass icon and has been moved to the left-hand side of the Writer window. This enables users to display more of the user interface at once, for example using the Navigator Sidebar and the new Styles Spotlight tool at the same time, utilising screen real-estate more efficiently, especially when working on portrait A4 documents.

Viewport-Based Preloading

The newly improved Viewport-Based Preloading takes performance to the next level, making editing large documents smoother and more responsive than ever. By focusing resources on the visible area of a document, we’ve boosted rendering speeds even with lengthy, complex files. Whether you’re working on multi-page reports or extensive research documents, you’ll enjoy speedy rendering and a more fluid editing experience. Say goodbye to long load times and hello to efficiency!

This simplified graphic demonstrates one of the intelligent-rendering improvements.

Hyphenation Control – ODF-compliant hyphenation settings for better text layout

The Exclude from Hyphenation feature gives users the ability to disable hyphenation for specific words, without losing essential spell checking and locale-dependent text layout. This and other powerful hyphenation settings makes it easier to manage complex words while preserving accurate font features, such as umlauts and regional language settings.

With thanks to László Németh for work on this feature.

eID Easy PDF Signing – Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) support

Collabora Online now supports Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) through our eID Easy integration, bringing the highest level of legal and secure document signing to your collaborative workflows. QES signatures are EU-compliant and legally equivalent to handwritten signatures, ensuring authenticity and integrity. This update empowers organisations to sign and verify documents directly within Collabora Online, eliminating the need to switch to a third-party applications and maintaining full control over sensitive documents.

PDF 2.0 Support – More secure and modern PDF handling

With PDF 2.0 support, Collabora Online enhances document security, compatibility, and reliability for modern workflows. PDF 2.0 introduces stronger encryption, improved digital signatures, and better handling of transparency and annotations, ensuring documents are not only more secure but also more future-proof. Whether sharing, archiving, or digitally signing documents, this update ensures Collabora Online stays aligned with the latest industry standards.

With thanks to ZenDiS for helping fund this update.

Per-User Change Tracking – Granular edit tracking by user

Collabora Online now offers per-user change tracking, giving document owners the ability to enable or disable tracking on a user-by-user basis. This means you can track changes for specific users while allowing others to edit freely, providing greater flexibility in collaborative workflows. Whether you need detailed audit trails for select contributors or want to minimize unnecessary markup, this feature ensures more precise and manageable version control.

With thanks to ZenDiS for helping fund this update.

Focus Cell Highlighting – Visually track active cells

In this release, we introduce Focus Cell Highlighting, making it simpler than ever to track your active cell in large spreadsheets. With a clear visual highlight extending across the entire row and column, users can quickly see relationships between data points and navigate data-dense sheets with ease. This small but powerful enhancement should reduce errors inputting cells in formulas, and other workflows where highlighting the row and column is beneficial.

Named Ranges ('A1:B10' = 'Expenditure') – Easier referencing of spreadsheet data

Not a new feature, but working with ‘Named Ranges’ has been improved in 25.04. The ‘Data’ tab has a named ranges section for easier access, named ranges can be selected from the address input field dropdown, and they are available in an autocomplete popup when referencing ranges. This all means working with large datasets is faster, more intuitive, and reduces errors in data entry. Instead of manually referencing cell ranges like A1:B10, users can assign meaningful names like “Expenditure” or “Quarterly Sales”, making formulas and references much easier to read and manage. This feature helps eliminate confusion, improve spreadsheet organization, and streamline collaboration.

Duplicate Record Handling – Easily identify and remove duplicate entries

No more manually scanning spreadsheets for duplicates—Collabora Online introduces a new “Handle Duplicate Records” tool. With just a few clicks, users can identify, review, and remove duplicate entries, ensuring clean and accurate data. This feature is perfect for data cleaning, CRM management, and financial reporting.

With thanks to Sahil Gautam from the community for work on this feature.

New "Summary Below Data" Option – More control over subtotal placement

In a new interop win, spreadsheets created in Excel, and then opened with Collabora Online correctly display data summaries either above or below the data – according to the settings chosen in Excel. Previously, subtotal rows would only appear below the grouped values, but with this option, users can position them above instead – enhancing flexibility in data analysis, financial reporting, and structured datasets. This aligns Collabora Online with user expectations from other spreadsheet tools and improves overall spreadsheet usability.

With thanks to Balázs Varga, allotropia for work on this feature.

New Functions – Enhanced spreadsheet calculations

Collabora Online now includes several powerful new functions, enhancing spreadsheet capabilities. Key additions include XLOOKUP and XMATCH, offering more flexible and intuitive ways to search and match data. New dynamic array functions like FILTER, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, SEQUENCE, and RANDARRAY make working with large datasets easier by allowing advanced filtering, sorting, and automatic sequence generation. These updates ensure better interoperability with Excel, while also providing users with more powerful tools for data analysis and automation.

With thanks to Balázs Varga, allotropia for work on this feature.

New chart types "Pie-of-Pie" and "Bar-of-Pie"

Collabora Online now supports two new chart types—”Pie-of-Pie” and “Bar-of-Pie”—which break down a slice of a pie chart into a separate sub-chart. This enhancement improves data visualization and ensures better compatibility with Excel-created documents containing these chart types. Whether analysing budget breakdowns or survey results, these new charts help make complex data more digestible.

With thanks to Kurt Nordback from the community for work on this feature.

3D Transitions & Auto-Transitions – Smoother, more dynamic slideshows

Engage your audience with smart 3D transitions and automated slide changes. These enhancements bring a more dynamic and polished feel to your presentations, eliminating the need for manual input while keeping the flow natural and engaging.

Copy & Paste Slides Across Presentations

Speed up your presentation creation times by copying entire slides between presentations online. Don’t be content pasting text boxes but having to redo the slide design. Want to show off that summary slide from your management meeting at your next conference? Easy with Collabora Online

Ruler Bar, UHD Support, Insert Curve Shapes Directly & Crop – Quality-of-life improvements for creating presentations

These seemingly small but impactful enhancements will streamline slide creation. The ruler bar improves precision, UHD support ensures crisp visuals on high-resolution displays, and the ability to insert curved shapes directly speeds up diagram creation. Plus, a new crop tool makes quick image adjustments effortless.

Present from Current Slide – More flexibility during presentations

No more skipping through the first 15 slides to get to where you want to be – with the new “Present from Current Slide” option, you can jump directly into any part of your presentation, making mid-session adjustments and Q&A sessions much smoother and more flexible.

Form Filling API – Enhanced document form support

Handling interactive forms in documents is now more powerful with the new Form Filling API. This allows users to fill out and process forms more efficiently, enabling seamless integration into business workflows, surveys, and administrative processes.

Integrated into Nextcloud Office for example, users may now create a template which can be prefilled with values from a popup window. 

Server Config help – Faster troubleshooting

Managing and configuring a server just got easier. With improved Server Config Help, admins can quickly troubleshoot issues, access clearer guidance, and optimize their setup with less downtime.

New Metric-Compatible Fonts – Better formatting alignment with other office suites

Achieve seamless formatting across office suites with even more metrics-compatible fonts. These fonts ensure better document fidelity, reducing formatting inconsistencies when switching between applications like Microsoft Office and Collabora Online.

Complex Language Support with font fallback improved

Collabora Online has significantly enhanced its support for complex writing systems, ensuring smoother text rendering and improved layout consistency.

• Better Quotation Mark Handling – Mixed CJK and Western text now displays correctly, with proper quotation mark rendering.
• More Accurate Font Selection – Adding special characters (like U+202E for right-to-left override) no longer affects the font family unexpectedly.
• Provisional Support for Font-Relative Indentation – Writer now supports first-line, before-text, and after-text indentation using em (typographical unit) and ic (CJK character width) for precise layout control.
• Faster Font Fallback Rendering – Optimized performance when using fallback fonts, ensuring smoother display for missing characters.
• No More Clipped Diacritics – Many languages such as Arabic use complex accent marks and diacritics for example ‘harakat’s. Previously these were occasionally clipped when rendered. With the new update, complex languages are correctly displayed.
• Improved Word Selection – Chinese and Japanese word selection is now based on ICU (International Components for Unicode) rules, ensuring more accurate text processing.

These improvements make working with complex languages more reliable and visually accurate, whether for document creation, collaboration, or professional publishing.

Second image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium License and was originally created by Jonathan Clark and is available here. This image has not been modified.

With thanks to Jonathan Clark, TDF for work on this feature.

The post CODE 25.04 Release appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Introducing Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) 24.04: Enhancing Performance, Interoperability, and Accessibility

Cambridge, 23 April 2024 – We are happy to announce the new major release of Collabora Online Development Edition (CODE) 24.04. CODE, the development version of our enterprise-ready office suite, Collabora Online, has over 88 million docker image downloads globally.

Collabora Online is a powerful, Open Source, collaborative office suite that supports all major document, spreadsheet and presentation file formats, which you can integrate into your own infrastructure. Collabora Online provides data security and sovereignty, and is ideally suited to the demands of a modern distributed working environment. Delivering a familiar look and feel, Collabora Online represents a real alternative to other big-brands solutions, giving you control and flexibility.

CODE is perfect for home use or small teams but is not recommended for production environments. Integrated with the Collabora Office core, CODE builds include cutting-edge features, typically with monthly updates. This new major release includes new features targeting the following key areas: performance, interoperability, accessibility, and security.

Below you will find more details on some of the new features and improvements that are available in CODE 24.04 and where you can download it.

“We’ve been working hard over the past 12 months to bring even more features, faster performance and smoother interoperability to Collabora Online. We’d love for you to put us to the test, get involved with our latest developments, give us feedback, and work with us to free your documents!”

– Michael Meeks, CEO, Collabora Productivity

Get CODE 24.04

Usability

Improving the user experience continues to be a key focus area for development on Collabora Online. Over the past year, we have made a number of changes to the user interface and general usability of Collabora Online as we seek to make Collabora Online more intuitive, simpler to use, and accessible for all users.

Contextual tooltips for easier spreadsheeting

Now working with spreadsheets is easier than ever. With the newly added contextual tooltip a user can start to type a formula – “=s” – and a list of available formulas appear. If there is only one completion candidate – “=sum(” – then the tooltip displays a list of accepted parameters for that particular function followed by its description.

Better and Faster Change Processing

In a bid to speed of the acceptance/rejection process of tracked changes, two new buttons have been added to the user interface – ‘Accept and Move to Next’, and ‘Reject and Move to Next’. While not adding any new functionality, the combination of these two processes into one easy to access button should greatly improve and expedite the processing of tracked changes for our users.

Additionally, improvements have been made to the change tracking feature – you can now track changes within tables, and also see what changes have been made within a tooltip when you hover over a selection in Writer.

Follow Users – redesigned for better accessibility

Collaborative working is at the heart of Collabora Online. We have had ‘follow the editor’ functionality for some time in our offering, but this has received a new lease of life with an even more intuitive interface. This is especially useful for conference calls or meetings, enabling all users to follow the note taker without any input required, or to catch up to a location in a document being referred to by another user.

The user list has been reordered, with your own avatar or the user you are following pinned to the top. The remaining editors will be ordered by when they joined the document. To unfollow any user, you need simply to click on either your own, or that user’s avatar.

Search for help and keyboard shortcuts

Simplifying things greatly, users can now search within the Online Help and Keyboard shortcuts dialogs to filter for topics and key words. The content is filtered at every keystroke, making it easier to find and discover information while minimising scrolling.

PDF Improvements

In our continued journey of improving accessibility for all, we’re excited to announce a number of improvements to the handling of PDFs, namely exporting to PDF v.1.7 by default, tagged PDFs produced by default, and hybrid PDFs now storing original ODF documents.

These changes should improve accessibility greatly – tagged PDFs for example include hidden accessibility markups that can improve the reading experience of those who use screen readers and other assistive technologies. A properly tagged PDF can also re-flow to adapt its presentation to different screen sizes, for example to provide a high-quality experience to users of smart mobile devices.

Hybrid PDFs on the other hand store the original ODF document as a PDF compatible file attachment. This is very useful for sharing documents with others as a pdf, while retaining the greater functionality of being able to modify the original file.

New Properties & Metadata

You can now apply more custom properties and metadata in additional fields to allow for easier information retrieval and improved contextual information for documents. The additional fields now available include: Contributor, Coverage, Identifier, Publisher, Relation, Rights, Source, Type. You can add these via File ▸ Properties… ▸ Description.

New Features

This year, we have worked on many exciting new features and UI improvements. Just some of these improvements are listed below.

Cell Protection and Section Editing

We’re excited to announce this new feature inspired by a number of our customers, including a French government ministry – the ability to lock and protect data within spreadsheets. You can now protect your Calc spreadsheets via individual cells, rows, columns or entire sheets. This exciting new feature empowers users to exert greater control over their spreadsheets and collaborate more effectively than ever before.

Similar to Cell Protection in Calc, in Writer you can now easily create and edit sections within text documents, allowing you more flexibility with your formatting and the ability to write-protect or hide parts of a documents. We previously supported sections in Writer, but they weren’t editable. There is now a new ‘Edit Section’ option in section’s local menu. The sections will also appear in the Navigator tab on the right hand side, allowing you to quickly navigate between them.

Improved AutoFilter and New Filtering Options

AutoFilter’s usability has been greatly improved with fewer redundant widgets and a clearer control set. New filter options such as “Filter by Colour” and “Filter by Condition” are also available.

Filter by Colour makes it possible to filter data by cell’s background or foreground colours.

Filter by Condition gives quick access to pre-canned filters (Empty, Not Empty, Top 10, Bottom 10).

Improved Read-Only Mode

Access controls are vitally important for any modern document editing solution. Similar to Cell Protection in Calc and Sections in Writer, with our improved read-only mode, our industry-leading, server-enforced controls just got better. Previously, our read-only access was just that – 100% read only. Now we offer much more granular control for documents and spreadsheets. Should your read-only users retain copy and paste access? Or perhaps you want them to be able to read a document and add comments, but not copy or edit contents? No problem with the upgraded read-only mode on Collabora Online.

Additionally, you can now follow hyperlinks in read-only documents. Previously you were not able to click through links in read-only documents – now you can follow links.

Present in Window from Impress

There is now an option to present your slides in a new window (as opposed to a full-screen presentation). This comes handy when the user is in a video conference and has to show slides. The new button is located in the “View” tab called “Present in Window”.

Quarantine

We have introduced a new ‘Quarantine’ feature, designed to save documents in the event of the system failing to save changes made to a document due to an unexpected fault.

Collabora Online operates in stateless containers to maximise security and efficiently use system resources. This means no information from documents is saved within a user’s container, nor the ‘state’ of a container from instance to instance. Instead, data required by containers is stored externally in a database or file system. This brings about a number of advantages, for example efficient resource utilisation, since stateless containers require no resources to maintain a state, high scalability, since containers can be easy created without the need to synchronise states, and heightened security, since no file storage is carried out in the end user’s container.

In the unlikely event something unusual happens and the container is unexpectedly closed, the state is lost, and in the case of Collabora Online any document edits since the last save or autosave event will be lost. As explained above, this is by design, and brings about a number of advantages. If however this is of concern to system administrators, the new document quarantine feature (configured off by default) can be enabled, which will store the document in the container image should it need to be recovered after a failure to save.

Background saving

In another speed upgrade, auto-saving can now be carried out in the background. No longer will you or other users have their editing frequently interrupted by an unexpected ‘Saving’ notification. Sometimes it’s the little things that count!

Interoperability

As well as providing a feature-rich, accessible solution, we also work hard to make sure our offering is compatible and works well with other document editors such as Microsoft Office, or Google Docs. In 24.04, we have aligned our product even more closely with these solutions, making sure that your documents always look their best, no matter who is dressing them!

Smart Justify

After a new line-breaking algorithm was introduced to Microsoft Word, some users may have noticed small rendering differences across products. In a great win for the Open Source community, we’re pleased to announce this discrepancy has now been resolved, with many thanks for this contribution from László Németh, with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme and NLnet.

The below image shows a composite of pages typeset by Writer (black) and Microsoft Word (red) before and after the update. Before the fix, it is noticeable that the difference in line breaks ultimately resulted in a two-page document for Writer, where Word rendered as one.

As well as being a great improvement in interoperability we also feel this update shows the strength of the Open Source community, the underlying LibreOffice technology , and the flexibility of Open Source solutions.

More information available here.

Simplifying Copy and Paste

Thanks to a new API, the copy and paste process has been much simplified. Permission may now be given for Collabora Online to directly access the clipboard in your browser, removing the previous requirement to download content. Click here for an up-to-date list of browsers with this API enabled (note some browsers may have API enabled, but not on by default).

Better Google Sheets copy/paste

This update should improve interoperability for users copying and pasting information to/from Google Sheets. This involved writing up the majority of previously undocumented protocol for Google Sheets, before ensuring that data copied from Calc includes markers such as <google-sheets-html-origin/> to fully work with Google Sheets. Additionally, data copied from Google Sheets into Calc will retain this marker despite not being used in Calc, ensuring round-trip functionality is maintained.

In our pursuit of ever-better interoperability between platforms as smooth as possible, we trust that this will help users who are either currently working with Google Sheets, or want to know that their data will retain functionality when pasted into other environments.

Improved graphics support

We have improved the way Collabora Online works with SVG and EMF/EMF+ files.

Scalable Vector Graphics files, or SVGs for short, are excellent for being scaleable. This means that when expanded, they will not encounter blurring problems in ways other image formats do. Previously SVGs opened in Collabora Online would default to the SVG’s fallback PNG, rather than rendering the SVG at the appropriate size leading to blurry images in some instances. With this new fix, OOXML should now render the SVG image correctly.

Three interoperability issues related to Windows EMF and EMF+ files have also been resolved – namely the lack of implementation of Polydraw MR, the inability to display bezier lines in certain EMF+ images, and an issue during conversion of especially large documents to PDF with watermarks (~1000 pages).

These fixes further improve our compatibility and interoperability with Microsoft Office and other document editors. Users can now expect a smoother experience when working with SVGs, EMF and EMF+ files containing advanced graphics features.

Performance Improvements

And of course, alongside the feature and user-experience improvement listed above, we have not neglected to further accelerate the performance of Collabora Online. Strap in – because we’re speeding up as we get technical with the performance upgrades!

Faster setup time

With this latest release, we will start authenticating a user as early as getting the first request to load a page – carrying out this authentication in parallel with downloading the document, and serving the related browser files. Compared to previously running these operations in series, this may cut page load times by as much as 50%, depending on the document and system configuration. This should lead to noticeably snappier document opening for end users.

18x faster tile compression

This speed-boost stacks two improvement, associated with optimising the rendering and re-rendering process of tiles, and changing the way the threading of this process is handled.

To keep things fast, save on bandwidth and reduce document latency, only changes to document tiles are sent from the server to the end user. For this to happen it is important to efficiently identify changes that require re-rendering for the end user’s screen at any moment. This has been accelerated by using RLE compression and AVX2 processing.

Previously, all potential pixel changes were identified using row cyclic redundancy check (CRC) when looking for changes requiring re-rendering. With the new solution, run-length encoded (RLE) rows are compared instead. Since RLE is a significantly compressed form of lossless data storage, this firstly means that nearly 4x the amount of rendered tiles can be stored in the cache (per view) whilst still making a memory saving. Compression of rows is now implemented using a single instruction multiple data (SIMD) algorithm, which as the name suggests, is able to carry out the same instruction on eight pixels simultaneously. This optimization accelerates RLE generation by 4.5x.

In addition to this 4.5x increase, further improvement to the threading of this process has led to a significant improvement in parallelism – with a 4x or more speed increase depending on how many threads are configured to be used. These wins compound to an 18x speed increase in this process of identifying pixels requiring re-rendering!

Many other performance improvements

In addition to the above, we’ve carried out a lot of work on other under-the-hood engine upgrades for the latest release, which will continue to improve the user experience for our customers. This work is very wide-ranging in scope, but includes much faster threaded calculations in Calc, improved loading of .xlsx spreadsheets with larger numbers of comments, minimised re-rendering of sheets when switching, optimising rendering of rows to be displayed in Calc, and much more.

While it is difficult to quantify exactly how much each of these improvements have decreased load times for any given document, we have spent time profiling many real-world use cases since the last release, and observe noticeably faster load and improved responsiveness of documents in Writer and Calc.

Get CODE 24.04

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 Online 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 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.

CODE 24.04 is built upon the code commits from LibreOffice 7.6 and LibreOffice 24.2.

About Collabora Productivity

Collabora Productivity provides Collabora Online, an open-source solution for editing and collaboration, alongside a range of other products and consulting services tailored to enterprise and government needs. With the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers globally, we are dedicated to contributing to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Our business-hardened office suite, Collabora Online for browser and Collabora Office for desktop, ensures long-term, multi-platform support. Additionally, we extend our services with Collabora Office for iOS and Android.

The post Introducing CODE 24.04: Enhancing Performance, Interoperability, and Accessibility appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Font Previews

Gone are the days of guessing what a font might look like, with our new font preview drop down, you can immediately view a sample of the font before applying it to the document.

Barcode/QR Code Generator

New to Collabora Online, create and edit barcodes and QR codes with the easy to use QR and Barcode generator dialog. Produce modern documents, with all the functionality you and your users expect and need.

Additional Fixes

As well as the exciting new functions listed above, a number of bug fixes have also been carried out, including:

• Fixed: Navigator Sidebar: Headings Do Not Update Nesting Instantly
• Fixed: Calc: With multiple views, an edited comment is committed when the other user switches sheets
• Fixed: Calc: Elements in Chart Type dialogue when editing chart positioned incorrectly
• Fixed: Calc: Wrong column width after save .xlsx file
• Fixed: Dark Mode – Document and text is dark
• Fixed: Calc: No info is shown that spreadsheet is read-only
• Fixed: Android app or browser: cannot open PDF
• Fixed: Notebookbar: Online help mixed with keyboard shortcuts (economed)

The post CODE & Collabora Online 23.05.4 Released with New Font and QR Code Features appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

Collabora Productivity Unveils Highly Anticipated Update to CODE (Collabora Online Development Edition), Empowering Users with Enhanced Productivity and Collaboration Features

Cambridge, June 13, 2023 at 13:00 CEST – We are happy to announce the new major release of Collabora Office Development Edition (CODE) 23.05. CODE is the free developer version of our enterprise version, Collabora Online, and includes all the features and enhancements that will be available in Collabora Online 23.05. CODE is targeted at home users and technology enthusiasts, and for those, it is a low-threshold way to get involved and familiar with our online office solution. CODE will be improved continuously and our next supported and maintained Collabora Online product will be built from it. The code is freely available on GitHub.

Below you will find an overview of the exciting new features and improvements that are available in CODE 23.05, as well as how to install the latest version.

Get CODE 23.05

Continuously Improving the User Interface

Collabora Online Development Edition introduces a sleeker and more intuitive user interface, designed to simplify and optimise the user experience. With a clean and modern look, navigating through various applications and accessing essential tools has never been easier.

Accessibility Features

Keyboard Shortcuts

The majority of computer users will use keyboard shortcuts to speed up their work and minimise the need to switch between different input devices. Previously, when collaboratively editing a file in CODE, the shortcut settings were set to the language of the first user.

Now, the keyboard shortcuts have been expanded to allow all users to be able to use their own language’s keyboard shortcuts when editing a file collaboratively.

Another improvement to using keyboard shortcuts is the ability to hold the ‘Alt’ key to highlight your options for learnability.

Page Navigation

Page navigation plays a crucial role in enhancing the user experience, especially when creating large documents in Writer. It allows users to move seamlessly between sections, structure their documents and find the content they are searching for easily within complex documents.

The existing navigator functionality will now be viewable in the sidebar, allowing you to jump to each section by simply double clicking the headings. You can find this by clicking ‘View → Navigator’ and it will appear in the sidebar. From here you can jump to headings, tables, images, hyperlinks and more.

JSDialogs

We understand the importance of making software accessible to everyone. That’s why we’ve introduced a new feature that allows screen readers to access menus and dialogs. We have moved the rendering of the dialog rendering to the client-side as JSDialogs, and converted all of our vex library usage to JSDialogs too, to enable higher accessibility.

This change will make it easier for those with impairments to navigate and interact with their documents through text-to-speech or braille displays. We hope this change helps create more inclusive software, and we will continue to strive to provide software that is universally accessible to everyone.

These accessibility wins bring benefits for everyone: in our previous releases we had 3 dialog types with 3 different looks. Now we have introduced a uniform look across the board using JSDialogs.

WAI-ARIA Annotation

WAI-ARIA, the Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite, defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. It especially helps with dynamic content and advanced user interface controls developed with HTML, JavaScript, and related technologies.

To enable screen readers to be able to read our user interface the WAI-ARIA annotations ensure that users know not only what text is currently displayed on-screen, but also the function of each part of the screen. Assigning ‘roles’ to html elements enables screen readers to know how to interact with a page. For example whether text is a hyperlink or a certain box is clickable or not may be immediately obvious to most users, for those with visual disabilities this may not be the case. By adding ARIA roles to elements, we can allow the screen reader to present the end user any additional information.

WAI ARIA annotation is currently available in compact mode.

Initial Screen Reading Support

Designed to assist users with visual impairments, this feature unlocks a world of possibilities, ensuring everyone can participate fully in online collaboration.

Our initial enablement allows writer to read paragraphs from the document as they are navigated through. When user types the screen reader reads the entered content.

For selections, after selecting ‘Hello’, the screen reader will typically say: “Hello selected”. In the same way, if text is deselected, the screen reader reports the state change: “Hello unselected”. Screen reading is a complex area that is best tuned to an individual users’s needs, and NVDA provides a rich palette of functions that can be toggled on or off.

Moreover there are specific shortcut for asking explicitly the NVDA screen read for reading the focused paragraph, the current text selection and so on. This function

Initial screen reader support is currently available in compact mode. Screen reader support is not enabled by default, since it is a resource consuming feature. It can be turned on by modifying the coolwsd.xml configuration file. Search for the accessibility section in coolwsd.xml and set the enable item to true.

Dark Mode and Custom View Settings

Per view settings, allows us to render views differently – including various options such as showing non-printing characters or spell checking underlines in different views, in addition to Dark Mode.

As anyone who’s worked on an important proposal late into the night will tell you, staring at a bright screen and concentration don’t often go hand in hand. That’s why we’re thrilled to introduce Collabora Online’s 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, and we will continue to strive to offer the best possible level of compatibility in the office suite market.

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 collaborate on more complex designs and graphics.

It has been great to work with allotropia on this excellent feature.

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 Online. 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.

Compact View of Pivot Tables

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

Document Themes

Document themes are predefined styles and formatting settings that you can apply to a whole document to easily change and re-purpose its appearance and give it a consistent style. It usually includes a combination of specific colours and fonts for heading, subheadings and body text, as well as sizing, alignment, indentation, spacing and other visual effects. When the format of the style is changed within the theme, it will change across all parts of the document following that style.

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.

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. This feature has been primarily developed for Collabora Online, but is useful on the desktop version, Collabora Office, too. 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 CODE 23.05 now.

Improved Frame Anchoring and Position

CODE 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.

Ergonomics

Simple Page Number Insertion

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 Numbers’

and you will see a dialogue box appear which enables you to customise the positioning, alignment and style of page numbers. There are a variety of supported languages available including Asian and Cyrillic styles.

Core New Features Introduced in 22.05 Updates

Since the major release of CODE 22.05 in June 2022, many new features have been introduced throughout the year. These have had extensive testing and are now officially core features of 23.05.

Choosing the citation style before inserting a first citation with Zotero in Collabora Online

Reference Management and Bibliographic Data with Zotero

Zotero is an open-source reference management software allowing users to manage bibliographic data and related research materials. It allows users to share bibliography libraries and notes, choosing from different citation styles. Collabora Online can now browse all the existing records of one’s Zotero library, enabling users to insert, remove, and refresh references, citations, and notes or to automatically generate bibliographies. This makes Collabora Online an excellent solution for research and academia alike.

This is currently a Nextcloud exlusive feature. Users will need to enter a valid Zotero API key into their office settings. More details on the Zotero plug-in are available on our blog. We hope to see more Collabora Online integrators making this feature available soon.

AI Based Translations with DeepL

DeepL is a leading AI company based in Germany. It offers the DeepL Translator, a translation tool based on a machine learning model that is trained by a large team of linguists. The plug-in is connected to the DeepL API and makes these high-quality translations available directly in Collabora Online without having to leave the document you are working on. To make use of it, it will need to be configured inside coolwsd.xml. Find out more about it on our blog or in the Collabora Online SDK. Once the feature is enabled, translating text inside a Writer document is as easy as selecting it, clicking the “Translate” button and choosing the target language from dialog.

 

Improved Hyperlink Pop-ups

The Collabora Online UI sees constant updates, improving the experience based on user feedback. One of the obvious changes can be seen in the way hyperlinks are handled in documents. Now, when clicking on a hyperlink, a small pop-up dialog appears, allowing several options. You can click the URL to follow the link (a pop-up will warn you, if you are leaving for an external page), you can copy the link, edit or delete it. The new and improved hyperlink pop-ups are available for all modules of Collabora Online and do significantly improve the handling of links – especially inside spreadsheets.

Get CODE 23.05

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 Online 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 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.

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.

Other community wins include:

• Improved positioning of glyphs
• Improved change tracking
• Easy sheet searching dialog in Calc
• and many more commits from LibreOffice 7.4 and LibreOffice 7.5.

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 Online empowers users to accomplish their goals efficiently and effectively.

The post CODE 23.05 Released, Empowering Users with Enhanced Productivity and Collaboration Features appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

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

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

Get CODE 22.05

Using Grammar and Style Checks in the Browser

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

“Jumbo Spreadsheets” with 16k Columns in Calc

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

Sparklines Now Available for Calc

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

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

Webp support available for all types of documents

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

Content Controls in Writer: Dropdown, Picture and Date Types

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

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

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

New Formula Input Bar with Pure HTML

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

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

Bandwidth wins and improved performance with Deltas

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

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

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

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

Faster Rotation of Bitmap Graphics

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

Dynamic Configuration of Multiple Hosts

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

LibreOffice Technology

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

About CODE

CODE is the Collabora Online Development Edition. It contains the latest developments and is perfect for home users. It enables them to regain control of their own online documents and to host them themselves in a secure and private environment. For tech-enthusiasts, it is a low-threshold way to get involved and familiar with our online office solution. CODE will be improved continuously and our next supported and maintained Collabora Online product will be built from it. The code is available on GitHub.

Get CODE 22.05

Open Source – so feel welcome to join

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

The post CODE 22.05 Released with Powerful New Features like Grammar Checks, Sparklines and “Jumbo Spreadsheets” appeared first on Collabora Online and Collabora Office.

location ~ ^\/nextcloud\/(?:index|remote|public|cron|core\/ajax\/update|status|ocs\/v[12]|updater\/.+|oc[ms]-provider\/.+|.+\/richdocumentscode\/proxy)\.php(?:$|\/) {

If you experience any problems, of have any questions, please do contact us.

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