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Month: November 2022

LibreOffice Conference 2022: Impressions from an attendee (and speaker!)

Regina Henschel writes:

Since the LibreOffice Conference 2022 was a “hybrid” conference, I decided to travel to Milan. These were exciting days. I gave two presentations: “Introduction to the ‘Limo Stretch’ feature of shapes” and “Creating ‘fontwork’ geometries beyond the predefined shapes”. The first one is addressed at developers, whereas the second one is suitable for everyone. You find the slides and additional material here and here. Videos of my talks are below.

It was important for me to gain insights into other areas. The Community Meetings on Wednesday introduced me to the problems that LibreOffice communities have in several regions of the world, along with solutions and success stories from others. During the conference, I heard a lot about language-specific aspects of LibreOffice. Do you have ever think about the way a piece of text in Arabic is justified? Or noticed what special problems occur with writing directions top-to-bottom and then right-to-left as used in Japanese?

Last but not least, I enjoyed personally meeting community members. Having lunch together and the wonderful pasta community dinner were opportunities to get to know each other, beyond code review, Bugzilla and mailing lists. I hope to meet you all again at next LibreOffice Conference.

Thanks to Regina for attending and giving her presentations! And, of course, all her work in our community 😊 Here are videos of her talks at the conference:

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LibreOffice project and community recap: October 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…

  • Throughout October, we edited and uploaded videos from our recent LibreOffice Conference 2022. So far, there are 36 videos from talks and presentations – with more to come! Here’s the playlist:

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  • Our documentation team released an updated edition of the LibreOffice Calc Guide 7.4 (revision 1) with new contents on sparklines and conditional formatting. Typos and last minute mistakes and formatting were also fixed in this release. Great work!

  • Meanwhile, we released LibreOffice 7.4.2, the second minor update to the 7.4 branch. All users are recommended to update, for maximum reliability and security.

  • Dominique Welt, Ph.D. Candidate and instructor at McGill University, told us about a presentation: “Using LibreOffice Base to Teach Relational Database Management”.

  • On October 20, TDF announced the availability of LibreOffice for Windows on the Microsoft Store, to support end users who want to get their desktop software from Microsoft’s own sales channel. There’s a convenience fee of €4.59, which will be invested to further support development of the LibreOffice project. But the suite will remain free of charge to download from the main website.

  • Finally, we launched a new “Liason” role in the Native Language Communities. This role aims to improve the communication between the global projects, The Document Foundation and the local communities. This communication should be directed in two ways: keep local communities informed on what is happening internationally, and keep the international community informed of what is achieved by the local communities. If you’re interested, we look forward to hearing from you 😊

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Mastodon. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help to make LibreOffice even better!

Announcement of LibreOffice 7.3.7 Community

Berlin, November 3, 2022 – LibreOffice 7.3.7 Community, the seventh and last minor release of the LibreOffice 7.3 family, which will be reaching soon the end of life, targeted to desktop productivity, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Users still using this version should start looking at the LibreOffice 7.4 family, now at 7.4.2, which has been extensively tested by millions of users worldwide.

End user support is provided by volunteers via email and online resources: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/

LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, the result of years of development efforts with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud.

LibreOffice Technology based products for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/, while for App Stores and ChromeOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-from-microsoft-and-mac-app-stores/

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card or other tools at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate

LibreOffice 7.3.7 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org

LibreOffice Conference 2022 videos: DaaS, ScriptForge, FontWork, OpenDocument, Writer…

Here’s a new batch of talks from the recent LibreOffice Conference 2022! Watch the individual videos below, or click here to view the playlist.

 

An introduction to the “Documents as a Service” project, with Marco Marinello

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Is ScriptForge really a scam? With Jean-Pierre Ledure

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Introduction to the feature “limo-stretch” of shapes, with Regina Henschel

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Creating “Fontwork” geometries beyond the predefined shapes, with Regina Henschel

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News from the TDF OpenDocument Format Toolkit, with Svante Schubert

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Push LibreOffice Writer to its limits, and see how it behaves, with Gabriele Ponzo

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Do something awesome! Join the Month of LibreOffice, November 2022

Love LibreOffice? ❤️ You’re not alone – tens of millions of people use the software every day. And hundreds of people around the world collaborate to improve the suite, update its documentation and help to spread the word. Join them!

In the coming four weeks, we’d love it if you get involved, join our community, and have fun. You can build up valuable skills for a future career – and you don’t need to be a programmer. There are many ways to help make LibreOffice awesome, as we’ll see in a moment.

And best of all: everyone who contributes to LibreOffice in the next four weeks can claim a cool sticker pack, and has the chance to win extra LibreOffice merchandise such as mugs, hoodies, T-shirts, rucksacks and more (we’ll choose 10 participants at random at the end):

How to take part

So, let’s get started! There are many ways you can help out – and as mentioned, you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…

  • Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers.
  • First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 7.4.2”.
  • Drum Beater, spreading the word: tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter or Mastodon! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.
  • Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

We’ll be updating this page every few days with usernames across our various services, as people contribute. So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker pack at the end as thanks from us! And who knows, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to win bonus merch as well…

Let’s go! We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon and Twitter accounts over the next four weeks – stay tuned!

LibreOffice and Google Summer of Code 2022: The results

Google Summer of Code logo

This year, LibreOffice was once again a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a global program focused on bringing more student developers into free and open source software development. Two projects were finished successfully. Students and mentors enjoyed the time, and here we present some of the achievements, which should make their way into LibreOffice 7.5 in early February 2023!

You can experiment with the new features by using daily builds and report any problems in our bug tracker.

VBA Macros – Tests and missing APIs by Hannah Meeks

Mentors: Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora), Thorsten Behrens (allotropia)

Hannah worked on an area that is important for power users dealing with Microsoft documents. Her work both improves VBA compatibility in LibreOffice and makes it easier to add missing functionality in the future.

Learn more about the VBA Macros improvements in the final report.

Extend Z compressed graphic format support by Paris Oplopoios

Mentors: Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora)

Paris got off to a flying start with the originally defined goal, which was to add import functionality for Z compressed EMF and WMF graphics and thus to improve compatibility with Microsoft documents. In the end, he also implemented exporting of WMZ, EMZ and SVGZ graphics, replaced homegrown PNG export code with one that uses libpng and added automated tests for PNG export in addition to tests for the Z compressed formats.

Learn more about the graphics improvements in the final report.

Wrapping up

Many thanks to all contributors who spent their summer time improving LibreOffice. You are awesome! And special thanks also to the mentors who always put so much love and energy into these tasks. That’s what makes LibreOffice rock.

Now we are looking forward to next year’s GSoC. If you are interested, why not prepare early? Learn more at out wiki page where some ideas are listed.

Participating in GSoC is a great way to build your skills, and show future employers what you’re capable of!

Press Releases

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Berlin, 18 December 2025 – LibreOffice 25.8.4, the fourth minor update to the free office suite developed by volunteers for…

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