Using Office documents in a Workspace

Workspaces are equipped to open Office-formatted documents including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Publisher. Users are able to open these documents in a read-only presentation so that the content can be read and inspected.

Aridhia uses a service called Collabora, which is a package of LibreOffice which provides the ability to open and read office-formatted documents. More information about this service can be found on Collabora's own website.

Uploading Office documents

Office documents can be added to the workspace using the usual upload methods described here. These documents can be stored in workspace Files or Blobs and can be organised and maintained like other documents using the menu button on the file list. Users should be able to move, rename and delete them as they would for any other type of file.

Opening Office documents

Any file with the following file extension can be opened using Collabora:

To open one of these files, use the menu button in the Files (or Blobs) list and select the relevant option. In the example below, the users would select Open with Calc.

Please note that the menu will change depending on the file type; Word documents will open in Writer, Excel in Calc, PowerPoint in Impress, and Publisher and PDF documents will open using Draw.

Once the menu item is selected, Collabora should open in a new tab in the workspace with the document contents shown in read-only mode.

Using Collabora

Users should be able to scroll through their document and use the search bar in order to navigate to a specific point in the open document.

Please note that Workspaces currently only supports Office documents in read-only mode. Users should not yet be able to edit the content of these documents in Collabora.

Users are able to open multiple documents at a time.

Tips and Tricks

We would suggest the following guidelines when using Collabora in a workspace:

• Only attempt to open documents which are smaller than 100mb. Attempting to open documents larger than this may cause performance issues for you or other users.
• If Collabora seems to be frozen or your document won't open, wait for a minute and the contents should eventually be shown on screen. If this doesn't work then shut down the Collabora viewer, wait a minute and then try again. If you continue to see performance issues then please report these to Aridhia's Service Desk noting the type and size of document you are attempting to open.
• Other issues using Collabora, such as the interface or usability can be reported directly to Collabora via their website.
• Please note that multiple users should be able to open a document at the same time.