ONLYOFFICE 9.4 brings new features – and a stricter licence

A new version of ONLYOFFICE, the open-source productivity suite, is out with a small set of improvements.

The new release lands nearly two months after ONLYOFFICE suspended its eight-year Nextcloud partnership over Euro-Office, a fork by a European consortium that ONLYOFFICE says violates its AGPLv3 licence terms.

Totally unrelated (yes, sarcasm), ONLYOFFICE 9.4 updates its licensing to tighten language around attribution, copyright notices and the labelling of modified versions. Viva le fork; it still permits modifications, but is more sniffy about use of its trademarks.

Features-wise, ONLYOFFICE 9.4.0 adds Croatian language translations across all editors and shuffles chart settings out of the right panel into a dedicated Chart Design. The Paste button in the top toolbar now offers paste options, useful for rich formatted snippets like tables.

The Document Editor now lets you add horizontal lines in documents to aid with hierarchy; while Spreadsheet Editor now support dark mode for sheets (only if Dark Theme is set, and it can be toggled) – two features users have been requesting for a while.

There are 25 ‘professionally designed themes’ available to use in Presentation Editor, as well as 20 new slide transitions to add a modicum of interest to bored eyes sitting through presentations (come on; no-one likes presentations).

The Forms Editor picks up a few improvements. When adding signatures to forms, the app defaults to inserting the most recently added image signature to save time, and there are new “Send for signing” and “Filling status” panels.

This release also patches several security vulnerabilities, including out-of-bounds read flaws in XLS-to-XLSX conversion, a GUID generation weakness that could let an attacker predict GUIDs from their creation time and a macro sandbox bypass.

Where to download ONLYOFFICE 9.4

Download ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors for Windows, macOS or Linux from the official website. Installers for the version can be had on the project GitHub releases page, just unfurl ‘assets’ at the bottom to find a DEB for Ubuntu, Linux Mint, et al.

On Linux, standalone versions don’t provide automatic updates to newer versions but the latest version can be installed over the top of the old, with settings and preferences carried over. Alternatively, install the official ONLYOFFICE Snap to receive automatic updates.