The open source office application ONLYOFFICE had its first point release since June on Wednesday, and it comes with a bevy of new features for its “Desktop Editors” suite of apps. They include a document recovery function, faster spreadsheet functions, and PDF annotation tools.

In its release announcement blog post, ONLYOFFICE showed off the new document recovery functionality debuting in version 9.1. From now on, when the app crashes or if you have an unexpected shutdown, you can recover—presumably—most if not all of your unsaved changes simply by restarting the application. I know I’ve had my share of unsaved document disasters, so this seems like a much-needed improvement.

ONLYOFFICE’S PDF editor is seeing several improvements with this release too, namely a redaction tool for documents containing confidential and sensitive info. There are other new annotation tools too, for drawing circles, rectangles, arrows, and connected lines in your PDFs. There’s added support for inserting charts, too.

Diving into the more technical and wide-ranging details of the update, the following items listed on the 9.1 changelog apply to all Desktop Editor applications:

  • Added external data for charts. When copying between editors, it’s possible to select either an embedded file or a link to the source
  • Added the ability to enable/disable chart elements
  • Added support for the Explosion option (separating a segment of pie and doughnut 2d charts) for opening
  • Added support for the HEIF images
  • Added the ability to configure the display of resolved/open comments in the left panel
  • Added preview for cloud templates
  • Added the “Spelling language detection” option on the application settings page (macOS)
  • Added the ability to configure sending notifications from the application via the “Notifications & actions” system section for modern OS (Windows 10 and later)
  • Added the option to select color mode for the printer in the print preview menu

Each of the Desktop Editors got unique updates too. Document Editor, the ONLYOFFICE equivalent to Microsoft Word, now has a “fully-featured chart editor” directly in the app, it supports viewing HWPML files, and you have access to the MathML format now.

For those deep in the spreadsheets, ONLYOFFICE 9.1 brings several updates to its Spreadsheet Editor application, too. There are several new form controls, support for filtering by date in pivot tables, and new highlighting of active arguments when you’re editing formulas. Notably, the LOOKUP, HLOOKUP, VLOOKUP, and XLOOKUP functions are all, according to ONLYOFFICE, now four times faster at running calculations.

If you’ve just moved onto Linux (or even Mac, if you have the money) from Windows thanks to the end of Windows 10, you might want to consider ONLYOFFICE and its 9.1 release as a potential replacement for Microsoft’s ubiquitous office productivity suite. While ONLYOFFICE offers paid online collaboration versions of the Desktop Editors, the basic offline editions are free and don’t require any kind of sign-up to use.

For those staying on Windows, you can get EXE and MSI installers from the ONLYOFFICE desktop downloads page. I was surprised to see available downloads intended for end-of-life versions of Microsoft operating systems going all the way back to Windows XP.

For Linux fans like myself, the easiest method to install OnlyOffice 9.1’s Desktop Editors is to get the suite from Flathub or from the Snap Store. You can also find DEB, RPM, and AppImage editions on the downloads page linked above.

Source: ONLYOFFICE via OMG! Ubuntu, GitHub