Home » Archives for Italo Vignoli » Page 115

Author: Italo Vignoli

LibreOffice QA Team launch a Bug Triage Contest

The competition will run from June 20th to July 5th, 2013
Berlin, The Document Foundation announce a Bug Triage Contest to prepare for the announcement of LibreOffice 4.1. The event will last two weeks during the availability of the first release candidate of the office suite, from June 20th to July 5th, 2013.
Details of the Bug Triage Contest are available online at the following address on TDF wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/QA/Projects/Bug_Triage_Contest (the page is still a work in progress, and will be consolidated before the event).
The top 5 triagers – amongst the known ones – and the first 10 new contributors will win a TDF/LibreOffice T-shirt.

Regione Umbria awarded for the migration to LibreOffice

LibreUmbria, the migration project of Regione Umbria to LibreOffice, has been awarded a prize for innovation – for metholodology and process – as one of top 10 Italian government projects in 2012/2013.

The migration project has been launched in September 2012, and is documented on the project’s website at www.libreumbria.it (only in Italian). So far, the first 1,000 users – on a total of 6,000 for the first stage – have been migrated to LibreOffice at Provincia di Perugia, without any significant problem.

Award to LibreUmbria
The group of LibreUmbria project managers with the medal and the award

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0.3

Berlin, May 9, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.0.3, for Windows, OS X and Linux, the third minor release of LibreOffice 4.0 family. OS X Intel packages are now signed by The Document Foundation, to pass OS X Gatekeeper security without user intervention.

In the meantime, another large migration to LibreOffice has been announced, as the government of Spain’s autonomous region of Extremadura has just begun the switch to free software of desktop PCs and expects the majority of its 40,000 PCs to be migrated by the end of 2013. Extremadura estimates that the move to open source – including LibreOffice – will help save 30 million Euro per year.

Community is growing too. After the success of the LibreOffice Impress Sprint in Germany, it is now the turn of the first LibreOffice Bay Area Meetup. It will take place on May 11, 2013 starting at 2pm in the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California. Bjoern Michaelsen will be there for some good Q&A, and most importantly for some hands-on work on how to get involved in the project, with Simon Phipps keynoting about “Foundations and Empires”.

The Document Foundation and LibreOffice are still growing at a steady pace: +13% year over year according to data parsed by Ohloh, with an average of over 100 active developers per month since February 2013. These figures tops the cumulative number of over 650 new developers attracted by the project since the announcement on September 28, 2010.

Developers are contributing not only to the code but also to the quality of the software, as in the case of Markus Mohrhard’s python script for LibreOffice that automatically imports some 24,500 documents and tests if the program crashes in the process (http://mmohrhard.wordpress.com/2013/04/19/automated-import-crash-testing-in-libreoffice/), or Florian Reisinger’s LibreOffice Server Install GUI which performs a parallel installation of LibreOffice without using the command line, for QA purposes (http://flosmind.wordpress.com/libreoffice-server-install-gui/).

LibreOffice 4.0.3 is another important step in the process of improving the quality and stability of the bleeding edge version of the suite, and facilitating migrations to free software by governments and enterprises.

The new release is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Change logs are available at the following links: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.3/RC1 (fixed in 4.0.3.1), https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.3/RC2 (fixed in 4.0.3.2), and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.3/RC3 (fixed in 4.0.3.3).

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.6.6

Berlin, April 11, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.6.6, for Windows, MacOS and Linux, targeted to enterprises and individual end users who prefer stability to more advanced features. This new release is suited to the increasing number of organizations migrating to LibreOffice, which is steadily growing worldwide.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation. There is a donation page – with many options including PayPal and credit cards – at http://donate.libreoffice.org, to support the growth of the project in areas such as infrastructure, marketing and development of native language communities.

LibreOffice 3.6.6 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center.

The change log – with over 50 bugs solved – is available at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.6.6/RC1 (fixed in 3.6.6.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.6.6/RC2 (fixed in 3.6.6.2).

Impress Sprint Dresden Retrospective

The weekend before Easter, a number of hackers congregated in the beautiful city of Dresden, Germany for the first Impress Sprint. Hosted by Dresden Technical University’s Institute for Applied Photophysics, and run by TDF volunteers, the event was rooted in the desire to improve Impress for power users, and getting a number of those tiny, but annoying little paper cuts and needless extra hoops to jump through eliminated.

TDF Hackfests and Sprints are taking place all over the world, organised and run by local volunteers, are excellent opportunities to taste the spirit of the LibreOffice community, and get you bootstrapped in a weekend to fix your first bug or two. As such, we are firm believers in the help-to-help-yourself paradigm. And it is fun, too!

Image

The rather long list of tackled bugs is here – thanks to all participants for making this a success!

If you want to join us the next time, following are the upcoming opportunities:

TDF releases White Paper to help migrations to LibreOffice

Berlin, March 27, 2013 – The Document Foundation releases a white paper to help organizations migrate to LibreOffice. Published on Document Freedom Day, the text explains how governments and enterprises can leverage Free Software to lower their IT expenditures and get rid of proprietary software lock-in.

The white paper can be accessed from here: LibreOffice Migration White Paper (of course, it is a Hybrid PDF document, which can be edited with LibreOffice).

According to the white paper, migrations to Free Software – and especially to LibreOffice – should follow a carefully crafted change management process, which needs to handle not only the technical aspects, which are actually the easiest ones to cope with, but also the barriers met when breaking long-term working habits.

LibreOffice liberates the users from proprietary document formats by adopting natively ODF (Open Document Format), which is the standard document format recognized by the largest number of organizations and supported by the largest number of desktop software (including Microsoft Office).

In addition, LibreOffice offers the largest set of import filters for proprietary document formats (including Microsoft Office, Publisher, Visio and Works, plus Corel Draw, Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPro, Quattro Pro and WordPerfect), and thus protects user investments in legacy applications, while providing a migration path to ODF.

Last but not least, LibreOffice templates are using only free fonts available on every OS which can be installed independently from any software package and thus foster interoperability between GNU/Linux, Mac OS and Windows users as documents maintain their original layout on every platform.

LibreOffice is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to maintain the infrastructure, and support events and marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at a global and local level.

Update: click here for the latest protocol documents

Press Releases

LibreOffice 26.2 is here: a faster, more polished office suite that you control

We’re pleased to announce the release of LibreOffice 26.2, the newest version of the free and open source office suite…

  • Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.4

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

  • Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.3

    Berlin, 13 November 2025 - LibreOffice 25.8.3, the third minor release of the free, volunteer-supported office suite for personal productivity…

Open Document Format

Why OOXML is not a standard format for office documents

Unfortunately, I keep reading about open-source software advocates who happily use Microsoft's proprietary DOCX, XLSX and PPTX formats for their…