Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in October – click the links to learn more…
- We announced LibreOffice 26.8.1, with around 40 bug fixes focused on compatibility with Microsoft Office files, along with more reliable text and CSV import across a range of character encodings.
- In our Community Member Monday interview, Adlair Cerecedo-Méndez described how he helped Mexico to develop Office GOBMX, a LibreOffice-based suite for public institutions, and shared lessons about migration, training and digital sovereignty.
- At LinuxDays in Prague, Mike Saunders gave a talk on where LibreOffice is going, including the project’s September download figures and current direction.
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- The QA community published its QA/Dev Report for September, covering contributions across LibreOffice, bug reports and fixes, and work by testers and developers.
- Our latest State of the Project slide deck looked at October 2025 to September 2026: 297 developers contributed 11,676 commits, alongside data on downloads, donations and community activity.
- The Document Foundation introduced its own visual identity, with a new logo, colour palette and typeface. LibreOffice keeps its existing name, logo and identity.
- We shared a group photo from the LibreOffice Conference 2026 and announced that the video playlist was complete, with 32 talks. The recordings are also available on PeerTube.
- A LibreOffice Migration Workshop in Nairobi brought together 40 public and private sector attendees for sessions on LibreOffice, migration planning, training and digital sovereignty.
- With Microsoft Publisher being discontinued, we explained how LibreOffice Draw can open, edit and save Publisher files, helping users keep access to their documents.
- A post on the developer blog showed how to connect a Python webview to LibreOffice and use it to send UNO commands, a useful approach for building extension interfaces.
- In The Politics of Standards, we looked at how technical standards shape who can participate in an ecosystem and why open, clearly specified standards matter to users and public institutions.
- LibreOffice 26.8 passed 9.4 million downloads in its first eight weeks, with more than one million downloads per week since its release.
- Then we posted a quick recap video of the LibreOffice Conference 2026, held in September in Pordenone, Italy.
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- Another post explored the history of the standardisation process for OOXML, from the fast-track ISO process to the concerns raised by national standards bodies.
- LibreOffice community members in Nepal took part in student hackathons, and Suraj Bhattarai reported on their activities.
- We invited developers and contributors to submit talks for the FOSS Office DevRoom at FOSDEM 2027, covering topics such as interoperability, accessibility, localisation, security and office software development.
- Finally, we released LibreOffice 26.8.2, with around 35 fixes for stability, multimedia playback, legacy file compatibility, Calc and hyphenation.
