LibreOffice monthly recap: March 2018

There’s so much going on in the LibreOffice project – in development, documentation, design, QA, translations and much more. So at the end of each month we’ll be posting summaries of recent activities and updates, to help you get an overview of what’s going on. Here’s what happened in March…

• LibreOffice 5.4.6 was released, with almost 60 bug and regression fixes. This is part of the 5.4 branch, targeted at mainstream users and enterprises. More information in the press release.

• The Indonesian community organised a three day conference, supported by The Document Foundation. The website has details (in Indonesian), and below is a video promoting the event – English subtitles are available:

• Meanwhile, we’re already getting excited about the main LibreOffice Conference due later this year, in Tirana. But we’re looking even further ahead, and announced a call for locations for the LibreOffice Conference 2019. The deadline for sending proposals is June 30, so if you want to help out, let us know!

• In certification news, Lothar Becker (Co-Chair of The Document Foundation’s Certification Committee) announced two new certified migrators and trainers – José Gatica and Xisco Fauli respectively.

• Buovjaga from the QA community wrote a blog post describing the importance of quality assurance in open source projects. “QA is acting like neurotransmitters in the body of the project”, he writes, explaining that QA is involved in many different areas.

• This year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is fast approaching, and we reached out to potential participants. In recent years, GSoC students have contributed many great features and updates to LibreOffice, so we look forward to seeing what will happen this year.

• Olivier Hallot from the documentation community wrote about rich content arriving in the new help system. “The new help can now access external videos on YouTube or similar services, and also open or download OpenDocument files to support the textual explanations of LibreOffice features in the help pages.”

• Also in blog news, Lera Goncharuk summarised migrations to LibreOffice in Russia on his blog. These include migrations at the federal government level, along with regional administrations.

• Finally, development continues on LibreOffice 6.1, which is due to be released in early August. You can see some of the new features in the release notes, such as the ability to sort images anchored to cells in Calc:

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