01 Apr 2022
LibreOffice project and community recap: March 2022
Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…
- We started off March with a custom shape tutorial from Regina Henschel. If you’ve ever tried to draw special and complex shapes beyond the basic offerings of LibreOffice, check it out!
- Following the release of LibreOffice 7.3 in February, we kept track of media articles to see what the press was saying. Here’s a list of articles in Italian, Polish and Portuguese.
- During March, TDF released two new updates for LibreOffice: 7.3.1 and 7.3.2. These fix bugs and improve compatibility – so all users of the 7.3 branch are recommended to update. (We also released LibreOffice 7.2.6 on March 10.)
- Meanwhile, the Czech community worked on a translation of the LibreOffice Base Guide 6.4. Thanks to Marcela Tomešová, Martin Kasper, Zdeněk Crhonek, Jan Martinovský, Roman Toman and Miloš Šrámek for their great work! 👍
- On March 8, we celebrated International Women’s Day. Our Diversity and Inclusion Group aims to improve diversity in the project, and “LibreLadies” is a project we started to connect and assist women who are interested in using and contributing to LibreOffice.
- How can we make free and open source software development sustainable in the long term? Mike Saunders from The Document Foundation appeared on the Sustain OSS podcast to talk about this issue, along with the challenges and opportunities in building communities.
- And shortly after, Heiko Tietze (TDF’s UX Mentor) appeared on the sister podcast covering design-related topics! Have a listen…
- In the middle of the month, the Board of Directors at The Document Foundation started its new term. Welcome to new new members, and thank you to those who are moving on, for all their work and support.
- LibreOffice is taking part in the Google Summer of Code 2022. If you’re a contributor, want to improve your programming skills and receive a financial stipend to implement new features in LibreOffice, get involved!
- Native language projects around the world help to make LibreOffice available to hundreds of millions of people. On March 19, we announced new (and bridged) communication channels for the Indian LibreOffice community. Join in and let’s help to spread the word about LibreOffice and free software in that part of the world!
- Companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem contribute many features and fixes to the software, and provide long-term support (LTS) versions and other benefits. We caught up with Michael Meeks of Collabora Productivity to find out what his team has been working on in recent versions of the suite.
- In 2019, the German LibreOffice community sadly lost one of its most active members, Klaus-Jürgen Weghorn. In his memory, The Document Foundation (the non-profit foundation behind LibreOffice) has decided to support a student through the Deutschlandstipendium initiative.
- And finally, our documentation team announced the Writer Guide 7.3. This covers all aspects of the word processing component in LibreOffice, and is well worth keeping on your (digital) bookshelf…
