A challenged world is an alert world. Individually, we’re all responsible for our own thoughts and actions – all day, every day.
We can all choose to challenge and call out gender bias and inequality. We can all choose to seek out and celebrate women’s achievements. Collectively, we can all help create an inclusive world.
From challenge comes change, so let’s all choose to challenge.
Berlin, March 4, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.1.1 Community, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 7.1 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice 7.1.1 includes over 90 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.
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.
Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud. They may have a different name, according to each company brand strategy, but they share the same LibreOffice unique advantages, robustness and flexibility.
Most significant new features of LibreOffice 7.1
LibreOffice 7.1 family adds several interoperability improvements with DOCX/XLSX/PPTX files: improvements to Writer tables (better import/export and management of table functions, and better support for change tracking in floating tables); a better management of cached field results in Writer; support of spacing below the header’s last paragraph in DOC/DOCX files; and additional SmartArt improvements when importing PPTX files.
GENERAL: (1) new dialog to select the User Interface flavor, aiming to pick the right UI based on each user’s own preferences at first start; and (2) print Preview is now updated asynchronously, to not block UI when adjusting settings in Print Dialog.
WRITER: (1) new Style Inspector to display the attributes of Paragraph and Character Styles, and user formatted text; and (2) significant speed improvement of find/replace operations.
CALC: significant speed improvement of Autofilter and find/replace operations.
IMPRESS & DRAW: (1) possibility to change animations for several objects at once in Impress; (2) addition of “Pause/Resume” and “Exit”buttons to Presenter’s Screen; (3) addition of realistic soft blurred shadows to objects; and (4) addition of new physics based animation capabilities.
LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term support options – represents the ideal solution for users that want to regain or keep control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.
Migrations to LibreOffice
The Document Foundation has developed a Migration Protocol to support enterprises moving from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, which is based on the deployment of a LTS version from the LibreOffice Enterprise family, plus migration consultancy and training sourced from certified professionals who offer CIOs and IT managers value-added solutions in line with proprietary offerings. Reference: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.
Availability of LibreOffice 7.1.1 Community
LibreOffice 7.1.1 Community represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites. For users whose main objective is personal productivity and therefore prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the new features, The Document Foundation provides LibreOffice 7.0.4.
LibreOffice 7.1.1 change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.1/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.1/RC2 (changed in RC2).
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 individual users are assisted by a global community of volunteers: 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.
LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.
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 7.1 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.
Nine years ago, on February 17, 2012, The Document Foundation was registered in Berlin as a charitable foundation, the home of LibreOffice. Today, TDF Members can legitimately celebrate by picking a glass of champagne – there should be enough for everyone – for a virtual cheers. We look forward to the day we will be able to meet again in person, because the pandemics will be over. For the time being, stay safe, and enjoy the 9th anniversary of The Document Foundation. Cheers!!!
Picture by Gerhard G. from Pixabay
Free Software Foundation Europe has developed an “I Love Free Software” template for the upcoming Valentine Day, to allow free open source software advocates to express the reason why they love FOSS, and they support it as volunteer contributors, or as simple users. FSFE template was developed using Inkscape, which is an outstanding FOSS application to create and manage vector images, but is also rather difficult to use if your graphics skills are limited. So, I imported the Inkscape SVG template into LibreOffice Draw, and tweaked it a bit by using Liberation Sans and Liberation Sans Narrow fonts – which are installed by LibreOffice and as such are always available to LibreOffice users, and by replacing the lines of text with a text box, to make it easier to write the personal notes and the name. I have also added a text box with instructions on how to fit the user portrait inside the heart shape, which is a rather easy operation with LibreOffice Draw.
Here you are. This is my FOSS Valentine made with LibreOffice Draw (and if you wonder why the font looks different, it is because I replaced Liberation Sans with IBM Plex Condensed, a different FOSS font, as I wanted to fit a longer text into the text box). You can download the LibreOffice Draw template from this link (the file is a Hybrid PDF, so you have to open LibreOffice and then open the file from LibreOffice, as otherwise the file opens as a regular PDF and cannot be edited as a LibreOffice Draw template).
The most mature and capable code-base, outside of Microsoft, to interoperate with Microsoft’s proprietary document formats
LibreOffice Technology is the result of ten years of intensive activity on the software’s open source code, coordinated by the Engineering Steering Committee and carried out by developers, software engineers, security experts, and interface and user experience specialists of many affiliations.
The goal of this evolutionary process was to create a single software platform for individual productivity on desktop, mobile and the cloud: the only approach able to offer users the interoperability features that enable transparent sharing of all content, and independence from single commercial vendors and vendor lock-in strategies.
This is the opposite approach to all other proprietary and open core office suites, which have developed different versions for each platform trying to replicate the functionality, but only succeeding in part, so that – for example – the internal structure of documents (which is not visible to users) is different for each application.
The evolutionary process from product to platform
The source code inherited from OpenOffice – with a heritage stretching back decades – was too complex for the average developer and had a build environment that was difficult to create and manage. It was therefore essential to mentor new developers, to reduce the learning curve and speed up the process.
To help newcomers, senior developers invented “Easy Hacks”: simple tasks for people with little or no knowledge of the source code, with the twofold objective of easing the learning curve, and having a number of problems solved without spending their precious time.
Thanks to Easy Hacks, the project managed to attract new code contributors, create a strong base of new developers, increase the number of core developers, and also involve several new “star” contributors capable of working on challenging code cleaning and refactoring tasks.
In a short time, under the stewardship of LibreOffice’s Engineering Steering Committee, developers managed to reduce the software footprint, undertake a long awaited source code renovation with the removal of tens of thousands of lines of dead code (and a large number of deprecated libraries), simplify the build process to the point where it could be automated and translate the majority of German comments into English.
To support the process, the development infrastructure was enhanced with the integration of several components and the update or replacement of existing ones. Today, the process is based on automation – as much as possible – including tests, to free developers’ time for more demanding tasks.
The result is a source code base characterised by one of the lowest defect densities in the industry, according to static analysis tools such as Coverity Scan [1]. The density inherited from OpenOffice – 1.1 errors per 1000 lines of code – has dropped to 0.001, against an average of 0.71 for projects of the same size.
Overall performance was also significantly improved, especially when reading and writing large files in the ODF native document format and in DOCX, XLSX and PPTX proprietary file formats.
Once the bulk of the source code renovation process was completed, developers and UI designers worked on improving the user experience. They reorganized several menus, created new icon sets for Windows and macOS, improved existing icon sets, and extended the user interface options by adding a NotebookBar, with Tabbed, Grouped and Contextual variants.
Last but not least: LibreOffice – thanks to a huge community of volunteers active in localization – is the software for personal productivity available in more native language versions than any other application. Today, the software is released in 119 language versions, with 26 more in development.
New LibreOffice APIs and Scripting Libraries
LibreOffice’s APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are known for their steep learning curve, which was considered an obstacle for the development of macros within LibreOffice, and for integration projects on mobile and cloud platforms. To solve this issue, developers have created the more accessible LibreOffice Kit APIs and ScriptForge scripting libraries.
LibreOfficeKit is a thin API that provides access to LibreOffice functionality via C/C++ or writing external apps, without having to compile or link to LibreOffice, or learn UNO – the office suite component model – or other complex languages. The Kit allows fast rendering of documents for any application.
ScriptForge is an extensible and robust collection of macro scripting resources for LibreOffice, which can be invoked from user Basic or Python scripts. They help to overcome the LibreOffice API’s challenges, as they offer easy access to and management of windows and documents, automation of Calc sheets, cells and ranges of cells, management of dialogs and their controls, as well as access to data contained in databases.
LibreOffice, a champion of interoperability
LibreOffice is the most versatile office suite in the market for interoperability, thanks to its outstanding level of compatibility with the OOXML Transitional proprietary file format – the majority of DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files – and to the large number of import and export filters for legacy file formats released by the Document Liberation Project [2].
Given the large number of proprietary Microsoft Office files generated by users, they are managed by teams of developers with specific skills.
Microsoft Office file are analyzed to spot issues and “roundtripped”: opened and edited with LibreOffice, and saved back in the original format to check for consistency, until all issues are solved and the result is the same, independent of the software used (the image shows the process for XLSX files, but the same applies to DOCX and PPTX).
Interoperability with proprietary Microsoft Office formats is further improved with every new LibreOffice release, to ensure transparent handling of documents independent to the format: standard ODF or proprietary OOXML.
Open Document Format, the true document standard
LibreOffice Technology is also the best platform for true interoperability thanks to the ISO-standard ODF (Open Document Format), the native file format inherited from OpenOffice. ODF is maintained and further developed thanks to The Document Foundation, which has established the independent COSM [3] project – the Community of ODF Specification Maintainers – to hold funds and retain editors for contributing to standardisation of ODF 1.3 and other future versions.
The ODF standard document format was designed in a vendor neutral manner from the ground-up, using existing standards wherever possible, to achieve a level of interoperability which is still unrivaled. ODF is robust and solid, and is consistent and predictable (i.e. the underlying XML code of the document will always be the same, independent to the program version, the hardware platform and the operating system, and this will make the document easy to visualize and manage on any device).
Products based on LibreOffice Technology
Today, there is a large family of products based on LibreOffice Technology, for the desktop (with community and enterprise-optimized versions), for the cloud, for Android and iOS, and for Chrome OS. LibreOffice Technology is also used within larger products to convert and process document formats. These products are released by different organizations and have different brand names, but share the same common engine to offer users the same unique advantages in term of interoperability, resiliency, robustness and security.
[1] https://scan.coverity.com/
[2] https://www.documentliberation.org/
[3] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2019/07/02/the-cosm-project/
LibreOffice Technology White Paper is also available as PDF: Download File
A brand new version of the best free open source office suite, based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for desktop, mobile and cloud productivity
Berlin, February 3, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.1 Community, the volunteer-supported version of the best open source office suite for desktop productivity, is available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download. The Community label underlines the fact that the software is not targeted at enterprises, and not optimized for their support needs.
For enterprise-class deployments, TDF has strongly recommended the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and other benefits, including SLA (Service Level Agreements): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.
Despite this recommendation, an increasing number of enterprises have chosen the version supported by volunteers over the version optimized for their needs. This has had a twofold negative consequence for the project: a poor use of volunteers’ time, as they have to spend their time to solve problems for business that provide nothing in return to the community, and a net loss for ecosystem companies.
This has been a problem for the sustainability of the LibreOffice project, because it has slowed down the evolution of the software. In fact, every line of code developed by ecosystem companies for their customers is shared with the global community, and this improves the product and fosters the growth of the LibreOffice Technology platform.
Both LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, which is the result of years of sustained development efforts (see the white paper) with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud, following the evolution of the marketplace since 2010.
Today, products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), for mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and for the cloud. They may have a different name, according to each company brand strategy, but they share the same LibreOffice unique advantages, robustness and flexibility.
By using the Community label we underline the importance of enterprise customers contributing to our mission, according to their ability, and how much we appreciate their support.
LibreOffice 7.1 Community New Features [1]
LibreOffice 7.1 Community’s new features have been developed by a large number of code contributors: 73% of commits are from developers employed by companies sitting in the Advisory Board – Collabora, Red Hat and CIB/allotropia – to serve their enterprise customers, plus other organizations (including TDF), and 27% are from individual volunteers.
GENERAL
WRITER
CALC
IMPRESS & DRAW
MACRO
A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 7.1 Community is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLutwM8XKvo and also on PeerTube: https://peertube.opencloud.lu/videos/watch/38ac180b-62b5-44b7-b649-74c7efe05758
LibreOffice, the best tool for interoperability
LibreOffice 7.1 Community adds several interoperability improvements with DOCX/XLSX/PPTX files: improvements to Writer tables (better import/export and management of table functions, and better support for change tracking in floating tables); a better management of cached field results in Writer; support of spacing below the header’s last paragraph in DOC/DOCX files; and additional SmartArt improvements when importing PPTX files.
LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite arena, starting from native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – with better security and interoperability features over proprietary formats – to optimized support for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. In addition, LibreOffice includes filters for many legacy document formats, and as such is the best interoperability tool in the market.
Migrations to LibreOffice
The Document Foundation has developed a Migration Protocol to support enterprises moving from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, which is based on the deployment of a LTS version from the LibreOffice Enterprise family, plus migration consultancy and training sourced from certified professionals who offer CIOs and IT managers value-added solutions in line with proprietary offerings. Reference: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.
In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.
Availability of LibreOffice 7.1 Community
LibreOffice 7.1 Community is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.12.
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/
For users whose main objective is personal productivity and therefore prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the new features, The Document Foundation maintains the LibreOffice 7.0 family, which includes some months of back-ported fixes. The current version is LibreOffice 7.0.4.
The Document Foundation does not provide technical support for users, although they can get it from volunteers on user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.
LibreOffice 7.1 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org
[1] Release Notes: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.1
Press Kit
Download link: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/FQXoczJb9RrExFA
