Collabora Online continues to improve its collaborative editing experience with powerful features designed to streamline document review and feedback. In this blog, we’ll explore the latest upgrades to the comment system, enhancing clarity and usability in Writer for teams working with large volumes of comments. From indented comment views and pop-up windows for lengthy feedback to smoother scrolling and advanced permissions, these enhancements make Collabora Online a must-have tool for efficient, real-time collaboration.

Content from Jaume Pujantell Traserra, Software Engineer

Collabora Online and Office offer the option for users to leave comments on parts of a document and in Writer, to reply to existing comments, creating comment threads. Thanks to the support from The Open Source Initiative, Collabora Online now has an improved user experience when working with large amounts of comments in Writer. With these improvements Collabora Online can be better used as a tool to collaboratively review a document through the comments system.

Showing Parent Child Relations

Previously, all comment replies were shown in a single list with no visual indication as to which comment was being replied to. Now, on Collabora Online, replies are shown indented with respect to their parent comment. In addition, a line is shown connecting a comment with its replies. This provides greater clarity when reading the comments, especially if several parallel conversations are taking place in a single comment thread.¹

Pop-up Comments

Comments are shown to the side of the document in relatively small boxes. This is good to not clutter the document, but it makes reading larger comments less practical. You can scroll inside a comment box to read it all, but the experience could be improved.

Now there is a new “Show comment bigger” option on the comments context menu (the three dots icon). This shows the comment thread in a pop-up which gives enough space to read much longer comments in a single screen.²

Scroll a Comment into View

To be able to smoothly change from showing a comment thread at the side of a document to it being in the centre of the screen in wide boxes, a better implementation of scrolling a comment into view was needed. Up until now, when a comment was selected, if it wasn’t fully on screen the document was scrolled to show it fully. But this was only implemented for top level comments, which were scrolled to the bottom of the screen. On displaying the comments in a pop-up, it became possible that the original scroll level may be incorrect after the change needing a further fix. With this new implementation the comment is scrolled the minimum to be back on screen avoiding big jumps.³

Promote Replies

Finally, there is the option to promote a reply comment to the top level.⁴ This allows the user to convert an existing reply comment to the start of a new comment thread. Any replies to the promoted comment will be moved to the new thread respecting their structure. The anchor point on the document of the new thread is the same as the old. This option is present on desktop Writer and will be available on the LibreOffice 25.2 release.⁵

More Granular Permissions in Comment Only Mode

This builds on the work done by Gökay Şatır to bring a read only mode with comments allowed in LibreOffice. Now there is the possibility to limit the ability of users to edit and delete only comments that they have created themselves.^6,7 This is in contrast to a normal editing session of a document where anyone can modify and/or delete any comment regardless of author.

1. Online commit: annotations: show parent child relations in layout
2. Online commit: annotations: added option to show a thread in a pop-up 
3. Online commit: annotations: nicer scroll on select
4. Online commit: sw: annotation: add option to promote reply to root comment
5. Core commit: sw: add new command to make a response comment root
6. Core commit: lok: sw: restrict deletions on comment only mode
7. Online commit: lok: sw: restrict delete and modify on comment only mode

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When working on a shared document, tracking changes is essential to ensure smooth collaboration and keep track of the process. Collabora Online’s Track Changes feature allows you to easily record, review, and manage edits made by multiple users. In this article, we will explore how to efficiently track and manage changes in text documents (Writer), so you can simplify your document collaboration process.

How to Start Tracking Changes

To begin tracking changes in your document, Navigate to the ‘Review’ tab and click ‘Record’.

Once this feature is enabled, every edit made by users—whether it’s a text insertion, deletion, or formatting adjustment—will be recorded. Removed text will be marked with a strikeout and any additions will appear underlined. Each new user will be allocated a colour so you can see which edits have been made by specific users. Every change is tracked, even if it is removing or adding a space or comma.

You will also be able to see a timestamp with the author’s name alongside each change so you can see what was changed, when and by who.

Adding Comments to Changes

In addition to accepting or rejecting changes, Collabora Online enables you to comment on changes, adding explanations or suggestions directly into the document:

1. Right-click where you want to comment and select ‘Insert Comment’.
2. The comment will appear alongside the text, allowing other collaborators to reply or resolve the comment.

Reviewing and Managing Changes

Once changes are tracked, you can Accept or Reject them directly within the document:

1. Right-click on any tracked change and select ‘Accept Change‘ or ‘Reject Change‘.
2. Or choose ‘Accept Change’ or ‘Reject Change’ from the top bar menu.

For even faster management of changes, Collabora Online now includes two convenient buttons:

• ‘Accept and Move to Next’
• ‘Reject and Move to Next’

Simply click within the first change then choose ‘Accept and move to next’ or ‘Reject and move to next’. The cursor will jump to the next change and allow you to accept or reject the next change.

This option allow you to process changes and quickly move through revisions without extra clicks, enhancing your workflow.

Managing Tracked Changes

For more comprehensive control over document revisions, Collabora Online provides a Manage option. This feature allows you to handle all tracked changes from one centralized location:

1. Click on the ‘Manage’ button in the Review toolbar to open the dialog.
2. Under the ‘List’ tab, you’ll see a full overview of all tracked changes. From here, you can:
   • Accept or reject changes individually.
   • Use ‘Accept All’ or ‘Reject All’ to process changes in bulk.

For greater control, the ‘Filter’ option lets you refine your view based on criteria allowing you to focus on specific changes. You can filter by:

• Date
• Author
• Type of action
• Specific comments

Check out more Collabora video tutorials to discover more tips and tricks on all Collabora Online has to offer!

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Efficient text management is a key part of any word processing workflow, and one of the most powerful tools to help with this is the Find and Replace feature. Whether you’re looking to replace specific words, phrases, or even paragraph styles, Collabora Online Writer has got you covered. In this guide, we will walk through the step-by-step process of using Find and Replace effectively, showcasing its flexibility and powerful options for refining your searches.

Getting Started with Find and Replace

To access Find and Replace, head to the Home tab and select Find and Replace. This will open up a dialog box with various options to refine your search.

Search by Whole Words

Begin by entering the word you want to search for. See the example below with “Land”. Select Whole Words Only, and click Find Next. The feature will locate the exact match in your document, skipping over partial matches.

Match Case for Precision

You can further refine your search by using the Match Case option. If you enable this, the search will be case-sensitive. For instance, searching for “Land” with Match Case turned on will skip over any instances of “land” with a lowercase ‘L.’

Advanced Searches: Using Regular Expressions

For more complex searches, Collabora Online Writer supports Regular Expressions, which allow for more flexible pattern searches.

Search for Word Variations

If you want to search for all words containing “land,” you can use a regular expression. For example, enter “[A-Z]*land” to find words like “landscape” or “landing.” Regular expressions make it easy to locate variations of a word across your document.

Finding and Replacing Paragraph Styles

Collabora Online Writer also allows you to search and replace Paragraph Styles, which is useful when you want to quickly update the formatting of sections across your document.

Replace Preformatted Text with Body Text

Suppose you want to replace all instances of ‘Preformatted Text’ with ‘Body Text.’ First, select the relevant section of your document, then open Find and Replace. Under More Options, choose Paragraph Styles, select Current Selection Only, and input ‘Preformatted Text’ as your search term. Replace it with ‘Body Text,’ and click Replace All to make the changes.

Searching for Special Characters

You can also use the Find and Replace tool to search for and replace special characters, such as line breaks.

Replace Line Breaks with Spaces

To replace line breaks with spaces, enter “$ “in the Find box (which represents a line break) and leave a space in the Replace box. This is a great way to clean up formatting in documents that may have uneven line breaks.

Conclusion

The Find and Replace feature in Collabora Online Writer is an incredibly versatile tool that can help streamline your document editing process. Whether you’re searching for specific words, replacing paragraph styles, or using advanced regular expressions, Find and Replace has you covered.

Don’t miss out on more tips and tricks for getting the most out of Collabora Online – subscribe to our Youtube channel!

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At Collabora Productivity, we like to be productive by name and by nature. One recent feature fix for Danish insurance company – balticfinance, has shown this to be the case. Ten working days after being requested, the updated pivot table functionality was delivered.

Pivot tables are an extremely powerful feature, to reorganise (or pivot) data from one layout into another. In the image below for example, the data from columns B-D has been reorganised by ‘Category’ and the ‘Job#’ into columns F-H, with the Value of each Job automatically summed together at the bottom. As an additional convenience, each category could be collapsed/expanded by clicking on the – or + symbols to view the values itemised or summed for the category.

As the cells within a pivot table have been generated by the spreadsheet, the contents cannot be directly edited. They instead mirror the value from the cells they are referencing, or automatically sum a category/total. This also makes cell formatting within pivot tables more complex than other cells. While Collabora Online has had strong interoperability with pivot tables created in Microsoft Excel for some time, previously we did not display cell formatting (such as background colours) for pivot tables created in Excel. balticfinance came to us with this exact request.

After receiving the support request on Friday 26^th January, Collabora engineers began work on the update on Monday the 29^th, with the fix delivered for testing on the 9^th February – two weeks from the initial request. The fix now means pivot table cells edited in Excel and opened in Collabora Online both retain their formatting, and survive the round trip export back to Excel in Microsoft’s OOXML format.

As well as being a great example of the deep interoperability offered by Collabora Online, we feel this story well illustrates the benefits of working with a responsive company such as Collabora Productivity for your office solution. Unlike some faceless companies, we are open and want to work with you.

If you have a special use case – get in touch! Let us help you free your documents. Learn more about our Consultancy or contact us at hello@collaboraoffice.com.

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Responding to the needs of one of our partners, we have created a new API to read and populate fields in documents without the need to open the document. This means that certain fields can either be automatically detected and extracted from a document for an end user to fill in, or multiple documents can be quickly created and filled from a database.

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

Use Case A: A parts manufacturer has a database listing thousands of items, but would like to produce professional looking PDF data sheets for each part that could be sent to customers. Rather than copying and pasting from their database into thousands of documents, both taking time and introducing the possibility of errors, the new API allows them to write a script that connects their database to a document template and automatically populate fields for each part before export to PDF.

Use Case B: A company wants to produce project reports for customers, which include not only a table of time spent, but also an attractive pie-chart breaking down how that time was spent, generating a beautiful output with a few clicks either as a PDF to send unmodified, or as a DOCX document that can be collaboratively edited to produce a bespoke version that can then be archived and sent as a PDF.

Use Case C: A legal team, or department manager frequently has to fill in the same document. For example risk assessments, employee contracts, rental contracts, or other document with set text, and custom fields. The new API integrated with a Collabora Online partner, makes this job as simple as filling out the fields in a pop up window. This eliminates the possibility of accidentally editing other parts of the document, or leaving fields blank that should be filled in.

Easily create editable docs or PDFs from templates

Collate data centrally and create custom reports

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The PDF format, short for Portable Document Format, has become one of the most widely used file types across various industries and for good reason. The consistency of this document format, combined with its universal compatibility, security features, and ease of use, makes it the go-to choice for both professionals and everyday users. In this article, we will zero in on how to make the most of Collabora Online’s powerful PDF capabilities.

PDF Export Options in Writer

1. Go to the File tab, and select Download.
2. To open the options dialog choose: PDF Document (.pdf) as…

Managing Your PDF Files’ Size

You can choose to export the entire document or just a specific part by using: General → Range.

You can also adjust the image compression and quality settings to manage file size using the Images settings.

Not all PDF Versions Are Created Equal – how to correctly choose yours

Selecting the appropriate PDF version is crucial, especially for archiving, printing, accessibility, or creating PDF forms; you’ll find all these options under General → General.

Exporting Outlines

You can also export outlines, which will create a table of contents in the PDF’s sidebar, by using the options under Structure. Under this same section, there are options to include comments and placeholders as well. For more details, check the Help section.

The Initial View and User Interface tabs let you customize how the PDF opens, like setting it to display in full-screen mode.

How to Handle Links in PDF

If your document contains links, you can control how they are exported in the Links tab.

Managing the Security of your PDF documents

Finally, Security → File Encryption and Permission allows you to set passwords and manage permissions, ensuring your document is protected and accessed only as intended.

Navigating Calc PDF Export Options

Now, let’s talk about Calc: the process is similar to Writer, but in spreadsheets, it’s less common to export the entire document – It’s more useful to export specific pages, sheets, or selections, which can be defined using the print ranges.

Check out more Collabora video tutorials to discover more tips and tricks on all Collabora Online has to offer!

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Hiding rows and columns is an important feature, especially when it comes to handling large amounts of data, allowing you to conveniently tailor your spreadsheets’ layout according to your own needs. In this article, we will walk you through the process of using Collabora’s hiding tools to enhance your data visualization skills.

Understanding the Basics: Hiding Rows and Columns

Hiding rows and columns is a well-know and user-friendly formatting option. You can find it by selecting and clicking on the rows or column markers themselves. This feature is perfect for quickly managing which data you want or don’t want to see (and undo it later if you want). To use the Hide feature:

1. Select the rows or column markers respective to the data you want to hide.
2. Right click on the selected markers.
3. Click Hide Rows on the menu that shows up.

Exploring the Grouping Feature

Calc offers a more advanced data display option under the Data tab – the grouping feature.

If you want to group columns, you can do so by putting the focus on your chosen ones, and simply click Group; you can also show or hide them any time you want.

Tip for Effectively Hiding Data in Large Spreadsheets

For spreadsheets with lots of columns and rows that are of interest, the markers on the left upper corner of the spreadsheet allow you to easily show or hide full levels of information, as you can see in the below image.

Check out more Collabora Online video tutorials to discover more tips and tricks for working faster and smarter with your data!

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All the latest features in your pocket

Following on from our latest releases for Collabora Online in your browser and Collabora Office for desktop, we are pleased to announce Collabora Office for Android and iOS 24.04 is now available to download. Our mobile apps is built upon the foundations of our flagship product, Collabora Online, and enjoys full interoperability with the functions you find in your browser along with pixel-perfect rendering of documents built online and vice versa. However, to enhance the user experience the interface has been simplified to maximise usability on a mobile device.

Improvements to the user experience in the latest update include:

• A wider comments section to view collaborative discussions more easily on your mobile device.
• A save progress bar has been added to the navigation bar providing visual confirmation of a save action.
• A cleaner top toolbar introduced to further streamline mobile usability.

Additional updates include:

• A smoother user experience when navigating through menus and sub-menus.
• Smarter handling of context menus for inactive tabs in Calc.
• Smoother panning of spreadsheets within Calc.

In addition to your phone, these apps are optimised for iPads (iPadOS) and Chromebooks (ChromeOS), and run online or offline – there is no need for Internet connectivity.

View, share and edit documents on the go with Collabora Office for Android and iOS.

Collabora Office for Android

Collabora Office for iOS

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Find and replace is a powerful tool in Collabora’s Calc spreadsheets. Starting from the Home tab, you can access features such as wildcards, regular expressions, similarity search, formatted display, and many, many more. In this article, we will guide you through the many different ways you can use this feature to improve your data editing skills.

Finding Words 101: A Step-By-Step Tutorial

You can find cells containing, for example, “apple”, as shown in the image below:

To find only the word “apple” and nothing else, use the Entire Cell option.

You can also find all cells where “apple” appears at the end using the Wildcards option, under Other Options; if you enter an asterisk before the word “apple” itself, you’ll see all cells that end with “apple”.

In order to find cells that start with “apple” as a separate word, we use Regular Expressions – the regular expression for a space, and the caret character indicate the start of a cell. Click Find All, and you’ll see all cells starting with “apple”.

Finding Numbers

We can search for the number “1234” and all the cells containing that number will be highlighted.

We can also find cells where the number is formatted with a separator, such as “1,234”.

Additionally, if cells are formatted with separators, selecting Formatted Display will highlight these cells.

As a final example, we can search for cells containing a currency sign: you can see that all cells with a currency symbol are identified.

Searching within Formulas

You can distinguish between values and formulas using the Values option under Other Options.

For example, let’s search for the value “12”. We see two cells containing the number 12.

Now, let’s search for “12” within formulas.

The results include formulas that contain the number 12 directly, as well as the formulas where it’s a part of a combined text reference, such as in Cell B12.

You can also search within comments – let’s look for the word “apple”.

Replacing Cell Styles

We have a sheet with two simple styles: one with a yellow background and another with a green background; let’s say we want to replace the green style: we select it and replace it with a nice, blue “Sea” style.

Click Replace All to apply the changes.

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