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The latest version of LibreOffice brings a range of enhancements. Many of the improvements are the result of the work of Collabora developers. We show you a selection of these contributions below, but for a complete overview and full community credits you can checkout the LibreOffice Release Notes.

More attractive Objects with new Blurry Shadows

Shadows used to be rendered as solid copies of objects. The new Blur option adds more realistic shadows to objects. The feature is available through the Shadows tab in the Area dialog or directly through the Sidebar. This feature was developed during a GSoC20 project by Ahmad Ganzouri mentored by the Collaborans Tomaž Vajngerl and Miklos Vajna. Several refinements were implemented by Collabora later on.

Further significant SmartArt improvements

Collabora is constantly adding improvements to the import of SmartArt objects from PPTX. Some of these were already present in Collabora Office 6.4 and also in Collabora Online 6.4. The latest developments by Miklos Vajna are now implemented in LibreOffice 7.1. Find all the technical details in Miklos’ last corresponding blog entry and the one before that.

Much faster Find & Replace

Many of Collabora’s contributions are aimed at enhancing the performance of LibreOffice and Collabora Office. Often this streamlining is the work of Collaboran Noel Grandin. For this release, it has resulted in a 50 percent performance improvement in the Find & Replace function of Writer. Performance improvements in Calc include spell checking, by Dennis Francis, and Autofilter, by Luboš Luňák and Eike Rathke of Red Hat.

Add visible digital signatures to existing PDF files

It is now possible to add visible digital signatures to existing PDF files. Earlier, this had been limited to invisible signatures. We first introduced this feature with the release of Collabora Office 6.4. Find all the technical details for this implementation in Miklos Vajna’s development blog.

NotebookBar now shows preview of Styles

Another new feature, that makes working with styles easier, is the Styles Preview widget that has been added to the NotebookBar. Nice work by our colleague Szymon Kłos.

Many more Contributions

LibreOffice 7.1 includes many more contributions by Collabora. For example: Writer now supports anchoring shapes relative to the bottom of the page; an issue in the formula input box which had occurred in Calc during the freezing of rows/columns was resolved; templates in Writer are now locale-independent; handling of cached field results in Writer has been improved. We would like to say: a big thanks to all our partners and customers helping us to make this work possible! Find out more about all the new features and improvements in the LibreOffice 7.1 Release Notes.

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Collabora Office is the LibreOffice-technology based suite for professional, mobile, and online use. Collabora Office provides businesses and professionals with the best features, interoperability, LTS and L3 support. Collabora is privileged to work with so many great contributors to the LibreOffice project and appreciates all the amazing work done by so many that is also included into Collabora Office. You can test the latest version of Collabora Office yourself! Just head to the Collabora Office page and request your demo today, or just click the button below.

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