Rutba Office 1.30 to 1.34: a release of repairs, then the features

After twelve releases between 6 and 8 October, we read back everything those releases had added, looking for what would go wrong on somebody else’s computer. 1.30 is what that reading found, put right. Then 1.31 to 1.34 went back to building, all five on 9 October.

1.30: a release of repairs

Most of 1.30 is fixes. These are the ones that matter most to somebody using the suite every day:

• Opening a file no longer freezes the other windows. A large workbook, or a file on a slow drive, is now read and unzipped away from the process every window shares, so Mail and the rest keep answering.
• A document over five hundred pages prints whole. Printing and PDF export used to stop at page five hundred.
• Accept All and Reject All reach everything, including inserted or deleted table rows, headers, footers, footnotes and endnotes, and undo puts them back.
• Power Query keeps leading zeros. A quoted “007” used to load as 7.
• Export to Video no longer eats memory. It used to decode every slide before the first frame, about 1.6 GB for two hundred slides at 1080p. Each slide is now drawn while the one before it plays.
• A lost network drive no longer holds the launcher. The Recent list checked its files one at a time, and a drive that had gone away kept the window waiting.
• Dialogs behave like dialogs for keyboard and screen reader users: focus goes into a dialog when it opens, Tab stays inside it, focus goes back where it came from when it closes, and Escape closes only the top one.

Two of the fixes are about trust rather than speed. A message your mail server had marked as junk used to be let through if it carried the name of a Safe Sender or a contact, and anybody can write any name. That name now counts only when the server also found that the message really came from them. And a file no longer gets to open things on its own say-so. A letter’s recipient list is attached only after you are asked, and never from a network share, because reading a share hands it this computer’s Windows sign-in. 1.31 applied the same rule to pictures and clips: one on a share is shown only once you have reached that share yourself.

WordArt that bends

Shape Format → Text Effects → Transform lays the words of a WordArt or a text box along a path, in Documents, Worksheets and Presentations. 1.31 brought Arch Up, Arch Down, Circle and Button. 1.32 added twenty of Office’s warps, the waves, Inflate and Deflate, slants and chevrons among them, and 1.34 brought the gallery to thirty. Each is saved as Word, Excel and PowerPoint save it, so Office draws the same arch, and a file Office made with one opens with it. In Documents the words straighten while you edit them and go back along the path when the caret leaves.

Documents

• Multilevel List gallery (1.34): Word’s list library, from 1. 1.1. 1.1.1. to Article I. with Section 1.01 under it, numbered as Word numbers them. A document Word made with these lists opens numbered the same way.
• Picture watermark (1.32): a picture from your computer behind the words on every page, washed out and centred, saved in the header the way Word saves one, so Word shows it too.
• Print starts from the document’s own page (1.32): its paper, orientation and margins, and A3 and A5 can be chosen as well as A4, Letter and Legal.
• Merging or splitting cells while tracking changes asks first (1.31), as Word does, because neither is recorded as a change.

Templates of your own

Save as Template (1.33), in the app menu of Documents, Worksheets and Presentations, saves a .dotx, .xltx or .potx into the folder Word, Excel and PowerPoint keep templates in, Documents\Custom Office Templates. Office lists the same templates, and so does the Rutba Office launcher, under Start something. Choosing one opens a new, untitled document made from it, with the template left as it was.

Presentations

Record with the camera (1.33). Recording a show from a deck that has cameos now records the camera too, slide by slide, and puts each slide’s recording where its cameo was, as PowerPoint does. In the show the recording plays with its slide instead of the live camera, and Record → Reset to Cameo makes a slide live again. Print choices (full slides, notes pages or handouts, with or without a frame) are now kept in the deck where PowerPoint keeps them (1.32).

Worksheets

• Four more Power Query steps (1.33): Fill Down and Fill Up, Unpivot Other Columns, Merge Columns and Extract. Since 1.31 a column keeps the type you gave it through every later step, and a date column loads as dates.
• Home, Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End go where Excel’s go (1.34), with Shift to stretch the selection, and the grid now scrolls to keep the active cell in sight.
• The fill handle repeats merged cells (1.31), as Excel’s fill does.

Pictures

Pictures gained star ratings and tags in 1.30, set with the keys 0 to 5 as Windows Photos takes them, and kept on this computer rather than written into your photos. A folder’s tile says how many pictures it holds, and Subfolders searches the folders inside the one you are in. In 1.33 Ctrl+R turns a picture a quarter and saves it: a JPEG by its orientation tag, with its pixels untouched, and a PNG redrawn without loss. Since 1.32 an SVG, AVIF or WebP gets a real tile even where Windows makes no thumbnail for it.

How it is held to account

Every one of these releases was put through a fuzzer that damages 5,400 files, the old Office 97 to 2003 formats and password-protected files among them, and opens each one. Every file either opened, asked for its password, or was refused with a sentence saying why. None crashed the suite. At 1.32 the fuzzer found one file it could not refuse cleanly, cut short inside its first 512 bytes, and that was fixed before release.

1.34 added a performance budget that the windows are checked against: a 300-page document, a 100,000-row workbook and a 200-slide deck must each open within twenty seconds and reach their end within eight, with the window under 1.5 GB. On the machine the checks ran on, the document opened in about two seconds, the workbook in under one with Ctrl+End reaching its last row in a fifth of a second, and the deck in under one, each window between 130 and 230 MB.