OnlyOffice, the popular free open-source office suite, announced new 8.1 release for its desktop editors.

The Desktop Editors is the offline use version of OnlyOffice office suite. It’s made up of Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation, and PDF Form apps, and, supports collaborative editing by connecting to a cloud service.

The new 8.1 release finally added full-featured PDF editing support for the both online and offline apps. After opened a PDF file, go to Home -> Edit PDF to toggle between viewing and editing mode.

When in editing PDF mode, you’ll see the tool-bar options to edit text, add, rotate and delete pages, insert various objects, such as text boxes, shapes, images, hyperlinks, tables, and more.

The presentation editor in the release introduced the Slide Master features, allowing to quickly apply the same layout across multiple slides. Meaning, make changes to the slide master will apply to all the other slides in your presentation. For the new feature, simply go to View tab.

The Document editor tool in the release now has a toggle option in the right corner. With it, user can easily switch between 3 modes:

• Editing mode – to make changes.
• Reviewing mode – without making changes.
• Viewing mode if you have no plans to edit or review your document.

For those who want to use the office suite locally without connecting to any cloud-based services, OnlyOffice Desktop Editor 8.1 added a command line option to hide cloud button on start page.

User can simply run onlyoffice-desktopeditors --lock-portals command in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) to launch the office suite for once. Then, the cloud button disappeared (even in next launch) until you un-hide by running onlyoffice-desktopeditors --lock-portals.

Other changes in OnlyOffice Desktop Editor 8.1 include:

• Better RTL support with improved word order, correct alignment for different text types.
• New media player in the presentation editor.
• An animation pane to display all the applied effects on the timeline in the presentation editor.
• No need other formats to create and edit fillable PDF forms.
• Serbian (Cyrillic and Latin) localization option.
• Set page color and customize numbering format in documents.
• Insert shape with shadow and adjust properties.

How to Get OnlyOffice Desktop Editors 8.1

OnlyOffice provides the official binary packages for Windows, macOS, and Linux, available to download at the link below:

For Ubuntu users, either download the DEB package, then click install it in Download folder via “Open with Software Install” option (Ubuntu 24.04 so far does NOT support this feature).
Or, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open up a terminal window, and run the command below instead to install the .deb package:

sudo apt install ~/Downloads/onlyoffice-desktopeditors_amd64.deb

Or, install the Snap package which is available in App Center (or Ubuntu Software for 22.04 and earlier). Though the Snap package runs in sandbox environment.

For choice, the office suite is also available as AppImage. Just download it from link button above, enable “Executable as Program” permission in file ‘Properties’ dialog, finally you may click Run the AppImage package to launch OnlyOffice.

Linux Mint 21 users can search for and install OnlyOffice as Flatpak package directly from Software Manager. While Ubuntu users can install it as Flatpak package by running 2 commands below one by one:

• Enable Flatpak support:

  sudo apt install flatpak

• Install OnlyOffice desktop editors as Flatpack package:

  flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.onlyoffice.desktopeditors.flatpakref

For a step by step and more detailed how to install guide, see this post instead.

Uninstall OnlyOffice

To remove the OnlyOffice Desktop Editors installed as DEB package, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:

sudo apt remove onlyoffice-desktopeditors

For the Snap package, just use Ubuntu Software or App Center to uninstall.

And for the Flatpak package, run command below instead to uninstall:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data org.onlyoffice.desktopeditors

Also run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove useless runtime libraries.