LibreOffice @ Didacta

LibreOffice has been exhibiting at Didacta, a large event focused on the education – schools and universities – environment, from February 16 to February 20, 2016, in Koeln (Germany). Booth was attended by Ellen and Walter Pape, and Thomas Krumbein during the week, plus Andreas Mantke on Saturday. Volunteers have answered individual questions (often about compatibility between MS Office and LibreOffice) and have, when it came up, mentioned Libre Logo, Dmaths and the export as a Hybrid PDF.

LibreOffice was generally very well received, and volunteers were often addressed as “Nice that you exist”. The number of LibreOffice installations in education and in the private sector seems to have increased substantially in the last two years (at least, compared to Didacta 2014 in Stuttgart). Relevant people talked, for example, of a 30% increase in schools in NRW (North Rhine-Westphalia ).

In a tour around the fair one could see the wide range of educational materials about MS Office, quite often in combination with hardware. All (electronic) whiteboards are equipped with MS Windows and MS Office. For almost every profession there are countless textbooks / brochures in combination with Word, Excel and PowerPoint (for example, “Office Organization with Word 2013”). We still need to do a huge effort to raise the awareness and grow the market share of LibreOffice in the educational market.