LibreOffice project and community recap: August 2024

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

• The biggest news in August was the release of LibreOffice 24.8. This is our latest major stable branch – and the second to use the “year.month” version number scheme. It has a ton of new features, improvements and fixes, some of which are shown in this short video (PeerTube version here):

• Then we opened registration for the LibreOffice and Open Source Conference 2024, which will take place in Luxembourg from October 10 – 12. Join us there! 😊

• In other conference news, we announced that the Luxembourg Media & Digital Design Centre is co-organising it. This is an Economic Interest Grouping gathering the Ministry of Education, Children and Youth (MENEJ), and the Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR), and the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST), created to support national activities related to digital learning and to operate service and innovation platforms.

• Next, we spoke to Khushi Gautam who is currently working on fixing bugs in her LibreOffice Outreachy project, “Sidebar Deck for Quick Find”, alongside Google Summer of Code students to make further progress.

• LibreOffice is always free to download from our website, but it’s also in the Microsoft Store for a small price (to cover the cost of putting it there, and further development). We announced that LibreOffice is part of the 15% “back to school” discount scheme.

• The Document Foundation (TDF) is the non-profit home of LibreOffice, and its Membership Committee (MC) administers membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in the Foundation’s Statutes. An election for a new MC is coming up, and in August we ran three live “townhall” Q+A sessions with the candidates. Recordings from two of them are online (PeerTube versions here and here):

• Meanwhile, German community members attended the FrOSCon 2024 event near Bonn. They had a stand with information flyers and merchandise, including stickers, pens, beer/coffee mats and more:

• Then we talked to Gladys David, who is helping out in LibreOffice’s Quality Assurance (QA) project.

• To coincide with the new LibreOffice 24.8 release, our documentation community published the Getting Started Guide 24.8 – an essential accompaniment to the software. Fantastic work!

• Finally, our Taiwanese community reported back from the LibreOffice Asia Conference 2024 in Taipei, covering government migrations to the Open Document Format, and much more.

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