The Open Document Format (ODF) is an open standard format for office documents, which offers a vendor-independent, royalty-free way to encode text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.
However, to realise its potential, it is necessary to understand the concepts of compliance – the degree to which an implementation adheres to ODF specifications – and interoperability – the ability to exchange and view ODF files without loss of fidelity or functionality across different applications and platforms.…
20 Jun 2025
Understanding ODF compliance and interoperability
18 Jun 2025
Before LibreOffice there was OpenOffice, and before OpenOffice there was StarOffice…
LibreOffice is the successor project to OpenOffice(.org), which in turn was based on StarOffice, a proprietary office suite developed in the 1990s. Learn more about the history here! And let’s hear from Stefan Soyka, who worked on StarOffice from 1990 – 1992…
When did you join Star Division, and what did you work on?
I came from Berlin to Hamburg to work for Marco Börries in his Star Lab in spring 1990, together with my friend and study mate Stefan.…
16 Jun 2025
LibreOffice at the Linux Arena in Pordenone, Italy
Marco Marega writes:
Hi, I’m Marco, an Italian translator and Member of The Document Foundation. Twice a year I take part in an event in Pordenone to promote LibreOffice within the stand “Linux Arena” of the PNLUG Linux User Group. It’s inside a local fair, part of which is dedicated to technology, makers, electronics and so on.…
14 Jun 2025
ODF: An Analysis of the Adoption of the Open Document Format
Over the course of its 20-year history, the ODF standard has been adopted, or at least recommended, by numerous supranational bodies and several countries on almost every continent. However, this does not necessarily mean that the ODF standard is used in accordance with these decisions, which are often laws in their own right, as Microsoft’s substantial lobbying and misinformation campaigns aimed at protecting its revenue of around $25 billion generated by the proprietary OOXML format (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX) encourage the use of the latter.…
12 Jun 2025
Create a colour wheel in LibreOffice
Regina Henschel writes:
Susanne Mohn asked on the German-language user’s mailing list how to create a colour wheel with LibreOffice. It was not about the colours themselves, but about the geometry. How do you create a circle or ring with equally sized sectors?
Very different solutions were proposed. Susanne Mohn, Harald Berger and I (Regina Henschel) have created a page in the LibreOffice Wiki so that these do not remain hidden in a thread.…
11 Jun 2025
The end of Windows 10 is approaching, so it’s time to consider Linux and LibreOffice
The Document Foundation and LibreOffice support the international campaign @endof10 https://endof10.org/
The countdown has begun. On 14 October 2025, Microsoft will end support for Windows 10. This will leave millions of users and organisations with a difficult choice: should they upgrade to Windows 11, or completely rethink their work environment?
The good news? You don’t have to follow Microsoft’s upgrade path.…