LibreOffice monthly recap: May 2021 – Community activities

Check out our summary of what happened in the LibreOffice community last month…

• Right on the first day of May, we started a new Month of LibreOffice, showing our thanks to everyone involved in the LibreOffice project and community. Everyone who contributes during the month can get a sticker pack – and a chance to win extra merch. We’ll announce the full winners here in the next few days!

• Throughout the month, we posted various sections from our Annual Report 2020: LibreOffice Conference, Design Community work, and Native Language Projects. In addition, we published the final PDF version, so check it out to read all the sections in one nice bundle!

• Did you know that you can work with 3D objects in LibreOffice? Long-time community member Regina Henschel wrote a tutorial showing how to make a 3D globe, using a map and a sphere. Rather neat…

• In May, TDF announced two bugfix updates for LibreOffice: 7.0.6 and 7.1.3. This marks the last release of the 7.0 branch – from here on, we will be maintaining the LibreOffice 7.1 series.

• Meanwhile, the PowerPoint compatibility team reported on its recent work, showing how PPTX presentations are imported more accurately into recent versions of LibreOffice. Of course, when you’re working on a presentation in LibreOffice, its best to use its native format – OpenDocument.

• Over in the Documentation community, there were some great updates in May: the Impress Guide 7.0 in Portuguese, the Calc Guide 7.1, and printed versions of various handbooks. A huge thanks to everyone in the docs team for all their work!

• LibreOffice is free and open source software, available for anyone to use, modify and share – and that will always be the case. At the same time, we really appreciate the contributions of companies in the wider LibreOffice ecosystem, who sell long-term support (LTS) versions and other benefits, and add many features to the codebase. So spread awareness of them, we’ve set up some LinkedIn pages for the “LibreOffice Enterprise” brands.

• Later in the month, talked to Hüseyin GÜÇ from the Turkish LibreOffice community. He recently became a Member of The Document Foundation, and is helping to raise awareness of the OpenDocument Format.

• The Google Summer of Code begins! This is a programme that connects students with free and open source software projects.We announced the list of selected projects – and we’re really looking forward to seeing the results. Good luck to all the students, and thanks to the mentors for helping them!

• And finally, a couple of administrative things. TDF announced a tender to implement the new TDF Membership Committee’s web-based tooling. Also, we’re moving to Libera.Chat as the host for our IRC channels, which are used for communication in many LibreOffice sub-projects.

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