Collabora Online 25.04 brings granular change tracking and more

Version 25.04 of the Collabora Online cloud office has been released. The developers have incorporated many improvements into the updated version. These include granular change tracking for all or individual users.

In their version announcement, the Collabora Online developers list numerous changes in more detail. Among other things, autotext and individual dictionaries, which can be used to save and reuse text snippets, are intended to speed up the editing of documents. The comment function is designed to improve collaboration. The navigation bar can now be accessed via a small compass icon on the left-hand side of the Writer window, which creates more space on the screen.

Speed booster

Editing larger documents in particular should be greatly accelerated by preloading the display area limited to the screen section (viewport-based preloading). According to the developers, operation should feel much smoother and loading times should be significantly reduced.

Another new feature in the area of security and compliance is support for qualified electronic signatures (QES) through the integration of eID Easy. These are compliant with EU directives and legally equivalent to handwritten signatures. PDF 2.0 support also provides stronger encryption, improved digital signatures and better handling of transparency and annotations, Collabora explains.

In addition, Collabora Online now offers change tracking as well as reverification of changes on a per-user basis. Tracking can be enabled or disabled for individual or all users. A restore function allows users to see which proposed deletions have been rejected, and the original text has been reinstated. This is useful for the legal sector.

Collabora is also making other changes, such as for spreadsheets. Users can now create “named ranges” in which several columns are assigned a name, for example. The handling of XLSX files is said to have been significantly accelerated. Further details can be found in the version announcement,

The development of Collabora Online is progressing steadily and continues to bring a number of improvements and optimizations for users. Version 22.05 from August 2022, for example, tweaked the spreadsheet and added the option of integrating writing assistants. Time-based compression should also lead to bandwidth savings of around 75 percent “per workload”.

(dmk)