Collabora CODE 26.04: AI, Better Collab, in a Bid to Stay Ahead

With Euro-Office due on Tuesday, and LibreOffice Online back in development, Collabora has plenty on the line with this new release.

It looks as if this is the week of the battling open source online office productivity suites. Today UK-based Collabora Productivity released Collabora Online Development Edition — CODE, for short — version 26.04. This comes just ahead of tomorrow’s planned unveiling of Euro-Office’s online edition, the fork of the online version of OnlyOffice, which is expected by some but not all, to be a centerpiece in the EU’s digital sovereignty efforts.

Based on LibreOffice, Collabora’s CODE releases are primarily intended for small teams, home users, and early adopters, and aren’t intended for use in production environments. CODE contains all of the features of COOL (Collabora Online, the company’s bread and butter paid edition that comes with support), which will be following in a few weeks’ time.

It’s not surprising, considering that a three-way struggle for dominance in the open source office suite arena seems to be developing, that Collabora 26.04 includes many new features. These run the gamut from AI-assisted workflow and new editing features to improved document interoperability and accessibility.

“Collabora Online Development Edition 26.04 is packed full of new features for developers and cutting edge users to try,” Michael Meeks, CEO of Collabora Productivity, said in a statement. “We’re focusing on continuing to boost productivity and collaboration, and for the first time, users will have the option to turn on AI-assisted workflows. Across the interface, you will also see extensive accessibility enhancements for screen-reading, as well as streamlined settings menus, sharper PDF rendering, and much more.”

What’s New in Writer

It’s something of a sign of the times that AI is front and center in this new release, with the option to activate AI-assisted workflows for Writer and Calc.

For collaborative projects in the platform’s word processing component, Writer, tracked changes are now smarter and more robust. This increases reliability in collaborative efforts in cases in which accepting or rejecting one change can affect others. In addition, the tools users need most when working collaboratively have been made easier to find, faster to use, and better organized — even across screen sizes.

Other changes to Writer include:

• Richer document comparison: This makes it easier to compare a current document with an earlier version, either from the server or as a local document. Insertions, deletions, moved text, images, and tables are shown as color-coded “redlines,” and include author and date details. Changes can be viewed side-by-side or using the standard tracked changes dialog.
• Multi-Page View: By showing two pages side-by-side, Multi-Page View makes it easier to navigate, review layout, and understand document structure at a glance.
• Redesigned comment cards: Comments now have a modern, readable card design, making it easier to interact with comments, or see which issues have been resolved.
• Smarter change tracking and reinstate: Tracked changes are smarter and more robust, especially when edits depend on one another. This results in improved reliability, especially in demanding workflows where accepting or rejecting one change can affect other nearby changes. Combined with improvements made to reinstate, review cycles are not only more predictable, but better suited for collaborative editing.
• Improved review toolbar: The Review tab has been reworked and command buttons have been added for new features. Important actions, like comments and spellcheck, are easier to reach and behave better in tighter toolbar space.
• Added Writer Navigator search: Search has been added to Writer Navigator, showing all results and making it much quicker to jump around long or structured documents. Especially for users working with headings, sections, objects, or large reports, this turns Navigator into a more powerful tool for orientation and movement rather than just a static outline.
• Richer sidebar previews: Instead of a simple scrolling list, the style sidebar now provides previews, making it easier to identify and apply the right style quickly, especially in documents with many different styles.

In addition to these, Writer now includes markdown support, for importing and exporting, PDF exports now support including comments in the margin, including when printing hard copies.

What’s New in Calc

AI is also at play in the spreadsheet application Calc, and can help with tasks such as analyzing spreadsheet data and troubleshooting formula errors. This can make formula work and data analysis less intimidating, especially when working with complex spreadsheets, which can be especially useful for occasional spreadsheet users.

New additions in this version of Calc include:

• Per-user spreadsheet view: Individual users working collaboratively on shared spreadsheets can now create their own sheet view and apply filters or see columns or rows according to their own preferences, without affecting how others see the spreadsheet. This enables teams to work collaboratively on spreadsheets while filtering for different variables at the same time, without disrupting someone else’s workflow.
• Automatic help fixing formula errors: To help users diagnose and fix formula errors, a floating exclamation mark now appears next to cells containing errors, opening a menu with options to help users inspect, edit and fix the formula.
• Pivot tables support for calculated values: Support for calculated values in Calc pivot tables has been added as an easy way to deal with pivot tables, where the desired values may not be in the spreadsheet directly, but can be calculated from the spreadsheet data. This means users are now able to create calculated columns in the pivot table.
• Ready-made table styles: This includes light, medium, dark, and custom themes, as well as 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.
• New spreadsheet functions: Newer spreadsheet functions have been added to make it easier to reshape, extract, and work with data, while also improving compatibility with other spreadsheet apps.
• JSON-based CSV conversion API: A new JSON-driven CSV conversion API offers a cleaner, more structured way to handle CSV conversion workflows. For developers building integrations or automation pipelines, this should make CSV handling more predictable and easier to control.

Other Calc improvements include improved copy and paste from array formula results, colored tabs, and dropdown lists that are more intuitive.

All This… and More

There’s more to Collabora, of course, than Writer and Calc, and there are plenty of new features added in those areas as well. For example, AI has also been added to Impress, Collabora’s and LibreOffice’s answer to Power Point, meaning that, among other things, users can now include multiple slide sizes in one presentation. Other changes include increased accessibility and how well Collabora works and plays with other office productivity applications, such as… well, Microsoft.

Wanna find out more? There’s an in-depth article on Collabora Online’s website. If you want to give it a try, you can install it yourself on your own server to see what you think, or better yet, Collabora will let you look at a hosted version yourself, so you can try your darndest to crash it. Betcha can’t do it.