Three releases in two days: password-protected files, mail merge and themes

Three releases are on the Rutba Office timeline for 25 and 26 September: 1.26.0, 1.27.0 and 1.28.0. They are less about how a page looks than about the jobs an office does every week — a letter to everybody on a list, a workbook somebody locked with a password, a contract whose changes need to be seen. This post picks those out; the notes on the timeline have the rest, with the tests behind each change.

They also closed items on the list of what was still open after thirty-one releases: password-protected files; mail merge, equations, an index and a bibliography; a spelling pass and an accessibility checker. And everything that post called written but not yet released — bookmarks, cross-references, captions, a table of contents, recorded tracked changes, shapes aligned and grouped on a slide — is now in an installer.

Password-protected files open, and save

A .docx, .xlsx or .pptx that Office protected with a password used to be refused. From 1.27 Rutba Word, Worksheets and Presentation open it: a small dialog names the file and asks for the password, and a wrong one is refused in place so you can try again. Both schemes Office has used for these files are read, Office 2007’s and the one from Office 2010 on.

File → Info → Encrypt with Password sets one, and every save after that is encrypted as Office 2013 and later do it: AES-256, SHA-512, 100,000 rounds. The password is held only in memory, and the autosave copy is encrypted with it, so what a crash leaves on disk is never the document in the clear. A password to open a file and a password to edit one are different things, and what a password on a Word or Excel file actually protects explains which is which.

An accessibility check, and spelling with your own words

Review → Check Accessibility, in all three document apps, sorts what makes a file hard to use with a screen reader or low vision into Errors, Warnings and Tips, under Office’s rule names: a picture with no description, a table with no header row, a slide with no title, text too pale for its background. Each finding goes to the thing it is about and says how to fix it, and most have a one-click fix. How to check a file for accessibility covers what any checker catches, and what none can.

Review → Spelling (F7) checks a whole document, every text cell of a workbook or every slide and its notes, with Change, Change All, Ignore and Add to Dictionary. English (United Kingdom) and English (United States) come with the suite, and a check never goes to the network. The words you add go into one dictionary that Word, Worksheets and Presentation share, so a product name or a customer’s surname is added once rather than three times.

Mail merge, envelopes and labels

The Mailings tab in Rutba Word works. The list of people can be a sheet of a workbook, a .csv file, the suite’s own Contacts or names typed in, ticked in and out, sorted and filtered. Address Block, Greeting Line — “Dear Sir or Madam,” when a name is missing — and merge fields are written as Word’s own fields, and Preview Results shows any record in place. Finish & Merge makes a document with a letter per record, prints them, or sends one e-mail per record through Mail, naming any that failed. The letter keeps its list, so it opens again attached to it.

Envelopes take the address from the selection or the address book and remember your return address, on DL, C5, No. 10 and other sizes. Labels come on fourteen common Avery sheets, and a labels merge fills each one with the next record. On the way, a landscape section began to print landscape, and a line break inside a paragraph to end the line on paper. The walk-through is mail merge, envelopes and labels.

Changes tracked as you type, and editing restricted

With Review → Track Changes on, Rutba Word keeps words typed as an insertion and words deleted as a deletion, each with its author and time, and a document saved while recording opens recording. Simple Markup is the default, as in Word, and Accept and Reject work on one change or all of them. Only typing and deleting are recorded so far: a paste, find and replace, a sort, and Enter or Backspace across a paragraph’s end happen unrecorded — worth knowing before you rely on the markup for a contract.

Review → Restrict Editing limits a document to no changes, tracked changes, comments or filling in forms, with paragraphs anyone may edit marked as exceptions, and an optional password written as Word writes it. Locked text refuses a keystroke with Word’s own sentence, and a document Word protected opens protected. It stops accidental edits rather than keeping anything secret, because the file is not encrypted. More in tracking changes and restricting editing.

An index, a table of figures, and fields

1.28 added what a long report needs at the back. References → Mark Entry (Alt+Shift+X) marks words for the index, and Insert Index writes Word’s own field, grouped by letter, with the pages each entry lies on. Insert Table of Figures lists the captions of one label — Figure, Table or Equation — with their pages; the captions came in 1.27, numbered by a field, along with a table of contents that refreshes rather than one typed in as text.

Insert → Quick Parts → Field puts a page number, the page count, the date, the file’s name, the author or the title anywhere in the text. F9 and printing work them out again, so “Page 2 of 2” becomes “Page 3 of 3” as the document grows. An index, a table of figures and fields goes through each one.

Worksheets: PivotCharts, slicers, sparklines, Flash Fill and themes

• PivotCharts and slicers (1.27). A PivotChart is bound to its PivotTable and redrawn when the pivot is refreshed or filtered. A slicer is a panel of buttons for one field of a table or a pivot: press an item, or several with Ctrl+click, and the rows follow at once.
• Sparklines (1.26): a small line or column chart inside a cell.
• Flash Fill (1.27, Ctrl+E). Type “Ada” next to “Lovelace, Ada” once or twice and the rest of the column is filled. When no one pattern fits every example, it says so and fills nothing.
• Themes (1.28). Page Layout → Themes dresses a workbook in one of the eleven themes Presentation offers, or colours and fonts of your own; cells filled in theme colours, tables, charts and shapes follow it.

PivotCharts, slicers, sparklines and themes are written as Excel writes them. 1.27 also brought workbook protection, comments as conversations, subtotals, Evaluate Formula and a watch window; the timeline has them all.

Presentation: sections, the Slide Master, transitions and animations

Presentation had no undo at all before 1.27. It has Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y now, one step per edit.

• Sections (1.26) gather a long deck’s slides under named headings in the thumbnail strip and Slide Sorter.
• The Slide Master (1.27): format the master’s title or body and every slide follows; put a shape on the master and it sits under every slide that uses it.
• Themes (1.27): eleven of our own, four variants each, the gallery drawing your own slide in every one.
• Transitions (1.27): Fade, Push, Wipe, Cover, Dissolve and five more, on one slide or all of them, moving on at a click or after a time you set.
• Animations (1.27): entrance, emphasis and exit effects, on a click or with or after the previous one, ordered and timed in an Animation Pane. What Presentation does not write — motion paths, media, triggers — survives in the file untouched.

Mail: a signature per account, send later and automatic replies

• A signature per account, set from that account’s Folder → Signature. Switching the From account swaps in the other account’s signature, unless you have already edited it.
• Send later: later today, tomorrow morning at 8, Monday morning at 8, or a time of your own. The message waits in an Outbox on this computer, and a send that fails stays there with the server’s answer beside it and is tried again every five minutes — where it used to be moved to Drafts after three tries without a word.
• Automatic replies, per account, with a start and an end and an option to reply only to your contacts. Each sender hears from it once, and it never answers list mail, a no-reply address or another automatic reply, so two away messages cannot mail each other for ever.

The window that stayed hidden after an update

1.27.0 went out with a fault. Rutba Office shows a window on its first painted frame, so nobody watches an empty white box while it loads. On the first start after an update had installed new files, that frame never came: the window was built, loaded and titled, and stayed hidden until the suite was started a second time. If you updated to 1.27.0 and nothing appeared, that was this fault, and starting the suite again was the way round it.

1.28.0 adds a fallback: a window that has not painted in four seconds is shown anyway. It was checked by hand the way an update runs — 1.27.0 installed, 1.28.0 installed over it, and the first start timed. Before the fix the Rutba Word window was still hidden two minutes on; after it, the window opened in under seven seconds. An installed copy picks up 1.28.0 as it picks up any release.

What it still does not do

• The old binary formats. A .doc, .xls or .ppt is still read as text and never written, and a password on one of them is not read.
• OpenDocument drawings. Charts and shapes in an .ods, and pictures and shapes in an .odp, are still left behind.
• Languages. The interface is English only, spelling is checked in English only, and right-to-left layout for Arabic and Hebrew is not built.
• Parts of the new features. Comparing two documents is not built. An animation plays a whole shape, not a paragraph at a time. The index is laid in one column here, though the column count you choose is kept for Word.
• Forecasts to Excel’s last digit. Microsoft does not publish how Excel picks its forecast smoothing constants, so Forecast Sheet’s figures are sound but will not always match Excel’s exactly.

Every release is still a Windows installer and a portable build, and nothing else; on a Mac or a Linux machine the suite is built from source. The Windows files are not code-signed, so SmartScreen warns on first run. Macros are kept in the file and never run, and there is no co-authoring — choices rather than gaps.