How to manually change the UI language in Collabora Office Desktop?

Installation & Configuration
1

I’m currently running the Desktop version: 26.04.3.3 (git hash: 7ddebab0ef ) and I can not find a way to change the UI language. It is automatically set to my Windows language (Portuguese Portugal). This option as default makes sense but I would like to manually change to another language (in my case I would be interested in switching to English). I can not find any option in the settings to do this. Maybe I’m not looking in the right place? Thanks!

2

Hey @Pedro

So before I answer, which of the two do you have? They share the name and the version number, but they are completely different programs:

  1. The classic Collabora Office desktop suite, with separate Writer, Calc and Impress windows and a Tools > Options dialog.
  2. The new Collabora Office desktop app, built on Collabora Online, which shows the same user interface you get in a browser, in one window with document tabs.

Your version string with the git hash in it looks like the second one, so here is the answer for both.

If it is the classic suite, go to Tools > Options > Languages and Locales > General and use the “User interface” dropdown at the top, then restart. That dropdown lists only the languages installed on your machine, so if English is not offered, run the installer again, choose to modify the installation, and add English to the user interface languages.

If it is the new app, there is no setting for this yet, and that is why you cannot find one. The reason is in how the app works. The user interface is the Collabora Online one, and Online takes its language from the address the host application asks it to open, as a lang= parameter, rather than from a preference the editor stores for you. The language is fixed for a document session at the moment the document opens, and the editing process is told which language to use for that view. In the desktop app, the app itself plays the part of the host, and it fills that parameter in from your Windows display language at startup. So there is nothing between you and Windows that you could change.

What you can do today is set a LANG environment variable for your Windows account, with the value en-US. Search the start menu for “environment variables”, open “Edit environment variables for your account”, add LANG as a new user variable, then close Collabora Office completely and start it again. Write the value exactly as en-US, with a hyphen and no “.UTF-8” ending, because the app passes it on unchanged. Delete the variable to go back to following Windows.

Please treat that as a workaround. It exists for testing and is not a supported setting. A proper language choice in the app is a fair request, so if you would like one, please open an issue at Issues · CollaboraOnline/online · GitHub and it can be tracked there.