14 DAY TRIAL // Today, April 21, 2017, Collabora was proud to announce the official release of Collabora Office 5.3 office suite based on the latest stable LibreOffice 5.3 open-source office suite.
The release of Collabora Office 5.3 comes along with Collabora GovOffice 5.3, and brings a lot of great new features and enhancements, as well as all the security fixes released upstream for the LibreOffice 5.3 series. Several new features of LibreOffice 5.3 were also backported, and it looks like there are various important improvements to the user interface as well.
"The biggest change in this release is the inclusion of a long list of new features, combined with many User Interface improvements, making Collabora Office more powerful and at the same time faster and more comfortable to work with," reads today's announcement. "Collabora is privileged to be part of the LibreOffice community, and gratefully acknowledges all the amazing work done by everyone."
What's new in Collabora Office 5.3
Prominent new features of Collabora Office 5.3 include new panels in the sidebar menu, simplified dialogs, better visibility of keyboard shortcuts, implementation of direct links to the user guides in the help menu, brand-new Safe Mode, new and updated filters, new Table Styles option in Writer, along with new arrows toolbox and Go to Page dialog, as well as a bunch of optimizations to the toolbar.
Calc is now compatible with the ODF 1.2 file format, also gets the new arrows toolbox that was implemented in Writer, along with improved Number Format options and Pivot tables functionality. On the other hand, Impress received two new templates, namely Pencil and Vivid, updates to existing templates, and better Template Selector functionality.
Among other noteworthy changes, we can mention that linked and embedded videos are now supported in the PDF export feature of Writer and Impress, and support for .iqy (Excel Web Query) files and MS ADO recordsets was added to the exporting of SharePoint lists functionality in Calc.
To improve the rendering quality of preview bitmaps created when inserting PDF images via the Insert -> Image menu option, Collabora Office 5.3 makes use of the PDFium WinForms control, and the roundtrip of PDF images was improved in PDF files for PDF viewers other than Adobe Acrobat Reader. Support for Windows Server ADMX Group Policy templates is also available, and you can try the demo here.
