500,000 Thanks

During the past weekend, we got the 500,000th donation since we started counting them, on May 1st, 2013. We are grateful to all the people who have donated, because they help all of us to keep the LibreOffice community growing and developing. The community has worked on translating LibreOffice in over 120 languages, closing the digital gap for many people who can only use LibreOffice in their native language and would otherwise be forced to use an office suite in English or in another foreign language.

Many donors have added a note to their donation, at the end of the process which starts on the following page: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/. Here is a list of the most significant from people who have had to access documents stored in a proprietary document format, a unique LibreOffice feature based on libraries developed and maintained by the Document Liberation project, in English or translated into English.

100% better than Office: keep up the good work.

Finally switched from OpenOffice!

Finally, something to open old Apple Works documents!

Great app. I can finally read old Word docs. Thanks soooo much.

I am using the software to convert my late father’s digital archive from an ancient version of MS Works to open formats.

I could not have created nameless numbers of documents without this suite, comfortably, between both a windows and a GNU+Linux environment. Thank you.

I needed a way to convert old WPS files and LibreOffice was the only thing I could find that did this without a lot of trouble. So: thanks!

Many thanks! At home I only use LibreOffice (and OpenOffice before that) and love it.

Payment for LibreOffice. Very glad this software exists! And much better than Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.

Thank you for a wonderfully capable system. I have recently discovered that I can load my deceased father’s WordPerfect files with ease.

Thank you for creating top level FOSS software. FOSS is the future and you do the work ground work for a better world.

Thank you for developing this. My business is close to going bust, otherwise I’d have given more, but it helped me open my old accounts in Apple Works. Good luck to you.

Thank you for LibreOffice. Installation was smooth and I could open and edit MS Excel. I will spread the news about this app (with donations of course).

Thank you for the office software. I am just a private user and am glad I am not forced to buy Microsoft products for the small amount of document I use.

Thank you so much for your wonderful product that has helped me open some really old Apple Works docs!

Thank you so much, I used this software at the university for about 6 years and it never let me down. You’re the best!

Thank you! Your program allowed me to convert some important family documents.

Thank you! This is the only program that really helps me properly read and format DOCX on my Mac.

Thanks for getting out from under Microsoft’s fat greedy thumb. Also, I was able to import all my old files without a hitch. Word, on the other hand, had problems with my old WPS files! You’ve really saved me a lot of grief. Thanks again.

Thanks for the LibreOffice resource – I had given up hope of opening many old CWK documents.

User since before Sun acquired the code base, before OpenOffice was. Great continuation of great software. Happy I am able to support it and its developers.

Using LibreOffice I was able to open documents as old as from high school in 1984 (in MacWrite format, I believe)! Thank you so much! I thought they were lost to time.

And this is the word cloud generated with the thousands of notes left by our generous donors, to give a flavour of the contents of the different messages. As you can see, recurring terms – size is determined by the number of occurrences – are “thank”, “open”, “alternative”, “good”, “great”, “much”, “work”, etc.

LibreOffice 6.4.4 available for download

Berlin, May 21, 2020 – The Document Foundation announces the availability of LibreOffice 6.4.4, the 4th minor release of the LibreOffice 6.4 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users. LibreOffice 6.4.4 includes many bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.

LibreOffice 6.4.4 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is not optimized for enterprise-class deployments, where features are less important than robustness. Users wanting a more mature version can download LibreOffice 6.3.6, which includes some months of back-ported fixes.

For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommends sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners, to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and other benefits, including SLAs (Service Level Agreements): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/. Also, the work done by ecosystem partners flows back into the LibreOffice project, benefiting everyone.

LibreOffice’s individual users are helped 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.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.4.4

LibreOffice 6.4.4 is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements are specified on the download page. TDF builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/.

LibreOffice 6.4.4’s change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.4.4/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.4.4/RC2 (changed in RC2).

All versions of LibreOffice are built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

Support LibreOffice

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 Tuesday T&T: Windows 7 SP1

Microsoft released Windows 7 on October 22, 2009, and ended the support on January 14, 2020. Technical assistance and software updates from Windows Update that help protect PCs are no longer available for the product.

Microsoft released the first Service Pack for Windows 7, also known as Windows 7 SP1, in February 2011, just a few days after the release of LibreOffice 3.3, the very first release after the fork. Only the first few versions of LibreOffice could run without Windows 7 SP1, which was turning Windows 7 into a stable operating system by solving 893 bug fixes and 77 security fixes.

In 2020, we still receive complaints from users who cannot install LibreOffice because the system asks them to install Windows 7 SP1. Nine years after the release of Service Pack 1 they are surprised when they are told to update their operating system. Although Windows 7 users are now a minority, the fact that there are people who have unconsciously used their completely unsecure PCs for years is a sign of a global security issue, as these users would not behave in a different way when using a different OS.

Anyway, users who are requested to update their PCs to Windows 7 SP1 can find more details about Windows 7 SP1 and the installation instructions on this Microsoft web page: https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/15090/windows-7-install-service-pack-1-sp1.

LibreOffice Tuesday T&T: Windows Installation Issues

According to our estimates, worldwide there are around 150 million LibreOffice users on Windows. And when we say worldwide we mean worldwide, as according to the origin of downloads we have users in every continent including Antarctica.

As a consequence, we get a large amount of questions related to LibreOffice on Windows. Many of these questions are about the installation process, because there are several issues which prevent the user to get the expected positive user experience. Unfortunately, the majority of these questions are related to Windows issues and not to LibreOffice issues.

When a issue is related to Windows, the Microsoft operating system will show a specific message, under the form of either an error number (for instance, “Error 1303”) or a specific sentence (for instance, “The program can’t start because api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll is missing from your computer”).

Of course, over the years we have built a small knowledge base on the subject, and we have published the results on one page on the wiki, in the area of frequently asked questions: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Faq/General/General_Installation_Issues_(Windows). Another useful resource is the Ask LibreOffice website (https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/questions/), where users can search for a solution.

The best resources, though, are provided by Microsoft, and are all multilingual, and are the Microsoft Support website (https://support.microsoft.com/) and the Microsoft Community website (https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us). For instance, a search for “Error 1303” provides around 20 answers, with comments, on the Ask LibreOffice website, and hundreds or even thousands of answers on the two Microsoft websites.