Collabora Office

I don’t want to keep coming back here to review this, but the experience hasn’t improved. Dark Mode is broken, it won’t toggle automatically and when I manually toggle it, it won’t turn back to light mode. Due to the unique way this app handles text the iPad’s keyboard accessory’s auto correct option can’t see what you are typing. Which means you need to rely on the apps spell checker, which crashed the app when I tried to use it. Along with white icons being defaulted when the app starts, the experience went from passable to unusable. I don’t know if an iPad OS update is causing these issues, or if the app is suppose to be this unstable. But you will find a better office experience elsewhere I get the impression that the developers or testers for this app don’t use it themselves. If issues like this make their way to the App Store.

Please fix because the app looks great but I can’t type anything on my iPad Air 2 (ios 15.8). On my iPhone (ios 16.7) it works beautifully.

When I last reviewed this app, it felt as if it was long dormant and abandoned, since basic issues like Dark Mode didn’t work, and my date time and battery would disappear in a void of white. On a good news the newest updates has fixed many of my issues but there is still work to be done. What was fixed. Dark Mode is now fixed, and there is a Toggle in the “View” Tab to enable it or disable it. I am disappointed that Collabora Office doesn’t default to the system view, but it’s a lot better than it was. What was also fixed is the ability to rename the file you are working on, while you are working on it. Thank you nameless dev who fixed that glaring oversight. However I still can’t give this app the rating I want to give it just yet, since it’s still missing features found in Apple Works… I mean the Pages app. 1) The Folio Keyboard and Mouse support is still missing. So no scrolling with the mouse wheel or 2 fingers. Right clicking spelling errors do not show the spelling dialogue. And Selecting text is still keyboard focused, you can drag and select. 2) When a Keyboard is attached to an iPad there is a small window which appears on the bottom of the screen which suggest words based on what you are typing, just like on a touch keyboard. This dialogue is empty. In Pages this window is really versatile including ways to format the text, and paragraph. Really would like to see this eventually added. Out of the two issues which remains, the first is a must fix, since Apple’s restrictive office tools are still the better suite compared to Collabora. But I feel Collabora has the potential to be the better office suite with compatibility with all office doc files. I just a bit more polish and I feel this can feel complete.

While Collabora Office does work, I’ve had no issues loading files from a USB, editing documents and even using it with a keyboard. There are feature just missing here that’s in Libre Office, and other Office Apps. I will be more than happy to update this review once these issues have been addressed. 1) No Dark Thumbing. Doesn’t seem like much of a complaint at first, but it’s an issue for me since my iPad doesn’t switch back to a light theming making the top bar with my Date time and the (…) menu just invisible. If you aren’t going to update the app to include Libre’s dark theme, then at least ensure that the system knows what theme your using so I can see the top row again. 2) Poor Keyboard integration. While I am able to technically use a keyboard with Collabora Office, it treats it as a touch input and is awkward to use, you can’t drag and select text, 2 finger scrolling doesn’t work, correcting spelling errors is a chore. I feel good integration with apples folio keyboard should be a target for this office suite, especially since Apples own Pages, Keynote, etc. does support it. 3) This is a personal gripe of mine, but please let the user rename the file they are editing. It sucks when I create a new file, it defaults to Blank.odt and I can only rename it, after I close out of the document and rename it, or renaming it in the Files app. These are my only real gripes, and I feel as if development of Collabora Office is just bug fixes with no intention to update the interface with these “new” interface methods. I hope at the bare minimum this app gets updated with feature parity with Apple’s own Office suite. Especially since the files are more platform agnostic to Apple.

Yé!

If you can get this app to work, it’s amazing. However, 90% of the time it fails to load the document it was creating, or it will freeze and you’ll be starring at a blank screen. If you are lucky you’ll be able to just restart the app and it will work, but sometimes you have to uninstall and re-install to get it to work. Again, that may not work. Can’t rename documents in app. If you try it will save it as another file, so you’ll also have a “blank.odt” in your folder in addition to the one you saved. IF it works, it’s pretty decent. Often will delete things if you switch between apps and the hot keys rarely work though. Also fairly certain it has never updated and I’ve had it for at least a year. I’m currently looking for a new app since I use a word processor every day for my job, but if this one gets an updates that deals with all of the bugs I’ll stick around.

I downloaded this to use the database but it’s not available so no point

Cannot freeze more than 16 rows!

I really wanted this software to work well, but it looks more like a project, an alpha release, than a real App for iOS. It’s wrong all over the place. One example. Basic stuff. I opened a .docx full of comments. Stuck on page 1. Cannot do anything else than click on menus. So I tried to convert the document in .odt Same result.

I use Libre Office on my desktop so I figured I’d give the equivalent on my iPad a try. I genuinely love the app but there are lots of things to be improved upon and added. The limitations that iOS has is difficult to begin with but all in all it gets the job done for free so not perfect but still amazing