LibreOffice monthly recap: March 2020

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more. March was a difficult month for many people around the world, so we’d like to say en extra big thank you to everyone who contributed time and effort to our software and community.

• LibreOffice includes a wide range of features for home users and professionals, but it can be extended further. We’re working on a new extensions and templates website, with a streamlined design and improved usability for authors and users. We’ll post more updates on this blog as it progresses!

• One of the many features introduced in LibreOffice 6.4 is the ability to join/merge multiple text boxes when importing PDFs. Indeed, many people have said that they find this feature especially useful, so we wrote a blog post showing it in action. Thanks to Justin Luth of SIL who implemented this feature.

• On March 8, we celebrated International Women’s Day. In the LibreOffice project, we try to make our community welcoming and friendly for everyone – check out this page for more info.

• Also in March, we posted an update about the new Board of Directors at The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. Here’s a pic from our meetup at FOSDEM – including most old a new Board members, the Membership Committee and the TDF team:

• Open Badges for LibreOffice is a new service we’ve set up, crediting members of the community for their work. Open Badges are PNG images that are awarded to contributors for reaching a certain threshold – such as a number of commits to the codebase, or answering questions on Ask LibreOffice. But these images are something special: they contain metadata describing the contributor’s work, which can be verified using an external service.

• Petr Valach from the Czech LibreOffice community reported back from InstallFest 2020 in Prague, which took place on February 29 and March 1. We really appreciate the help of our Czech supporters for spreading the word about LibreOffice!

• LibreOffice 6.4.2 was released on March 19. It’s the second revision release of the 6.4.x series, and includes over 90 bugfixes and compatibility improvements.

• On March 25, we celebrated Document Freedom Day 2020. We often talk about the benefits of free and open source software, but it’s also important to tell people about open standards as well. In addition, we encouraged people to paint a dove!

• Finally, some more news from our Czech team: they finished translating the LibreOffice Online guide in March. This is a comprehensive guide to installing, configuring and using LibreOffice Online, the cloud-based version of the suite.

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