LibreOffice Quality Assurance (QA) in 2024 – TDF’s Annual Report

TDF Annual Report 2024 banner

Quality Assurance (QA) is a cornerstone of the LibreOffice project, thanks to the activity of a large number of volunteers and the feedback of many users who help in reporting bugs and regressions

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

QA team work

In 2024, the QA team triaged thousands of bugs, bisected hundreds of regressions, and answered questions from countless bug reporters. As one of the most visible groups directly responding to end users, the QA team must be nimble and able to adapt to changes. In addition, it must deal with specific requests for help from other teams.

The QA team meets regularly on IRC on the #libreoffice-qa channel, which is the best medium for discussing bugs and regressions. The IRC channel provides an excellent opportunity to remain in close contact with team members, and to tutor new members in the art and skill of LibreOffice QA. This is bridged to the Telegram group.

During 2024, 5351 bugs were reported by 2463 users, which means 103 new bugs were reported every week on average. The QA team prepared monthly reports about their activity and posted on the QA blog.

Top 10 bug reporters

  • Eyal Rozenberg (211)
  • Gabor Kelemen (193)
  • Mike Kaganski (137)
  • Telesto (86)
  • Regina Henschel (85)
  • Xisco Faulí (82)
  • Stéphane Guillou (78)
  • peter josvai (75)
  • Rafael Lima (72)
  • Heiko Tietze (54)

Triaging

During 2024, 5086 bugs were triaged by 328 people. The top 10 bug triagers were:

  • Stéphane Guillou (stragu) (762)
  • Buovjaga (684)
  • m_a_riosv (499)
  • Heiko Tietze (374)
  • V Stuart Foote (241)
  • Mike Kaganski (232)
  • Julien Nabet (186)
  • Xisco Faulí (175)
  • ady (144)
  • Dieter (144)

Bibisecting

Also, during 2024, the QA team performed 561 bibisects of regressions by 30 people. The top 10 bisecters were:

  • raal (121)
  • Buovjaga (111)
  • Stéphane Guillou (104)
  • Xisco Faulí (91)
  • Gabor Kelemen (24)
  • Aron Budea (23)
  • Timur (14)
  • zcrhonek (10)
  • Mike Kaganski (9)
  • Justin L (8)

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!

LibreOffice Documentation in 2024 – TDF’s Annual Report

LibreOffice Bookshelf

In 2024, the documentation community continued to update LibreOffice guidebooks, and the Help application

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

New and translated guides

Throughout the year, the documentation project closed the gap between LibreOffice’s major releases, and the updates of the corresponding user guides. By the end of the year, all of the version 24.2 guides were updated to match the release of LibreOffice 24.8, and ready to continue for the forthcoming release – 25.2 – which arrived in February 2025. The goal of tracking the software releases closely was achieved, and the documentation team is now in a steady state of small updates between releases.

The updates and enhancements of the guides were an effort of all of the team, coordinated by Jean Weber (Writer and Getting Started Guide), Olivier Hallot (Calc Guide), Peter Schofield (Impress and Draw guides). A number of volunteers also worked in each guide by writing and reviewing contents and suggesting improvements. Special thanks to Jean Weber for making the guides available for sale in printed format via Lulu Inc.

LibreOffice 24.8 Getting Started Guide cover

LibreOffice Help updates

The documentation community also had a team of Help page bug fixes, closing Help documentation bugs, bridging gaps, fixing typos and improving quality, a must-have update to keep LibreOffice in-shape for its user base and documented reference of the application features. A total of 614 Help patches were merged in 2024. The Help pages, which are part of the LibreOffice codebase, were also refactored continuously for better maintenance and code readability. The localisation and translation team of volunteers was quick in flagging typos and English mistakes – while translating the Help content and the user interface.

ScriptForge libraries, and Wiki updates

The documentation community also had a nice contribution from Jean Pierre Ledure, Alain Romedenne and Rafael Lima, for the development of the ScriptForge macro library, in synchronization with the much-needed Help pages on the subject, a practice rarely followed by junior developers of LibreOffice. As we know, undocumented software is software that’s lacking; features that are unknown to the user can be a cause of costly calls to a help desk in corporate deployments. ScriptForge developments came together with their documentation, demonstrating the ScriptForge team’s professional maturity.

LibreOffice Bookshelf

In 2024, the documentation community also updated the LibreOffice Bookshelf – another download page for LibreOffice guides that is different from the current documentation page. The Bookshelf can be cloned and installed in organizations, libraries, colleges and schools, for immediate availability in controlled environments, as well as online reading of the guides. The Open Document Format chapters were transformed into static HTML pages, and are ready to display on computers, tablets and cell phones, bringing LibreOffice user guides closer to its public, anywhere, at any time.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!

Starting today: The Month of LibreOffice, May 2025

Month of LibreOffice banner

Want to learn new skills for a potential future career change, or expand your knowledge and have fun on the way? Then get involved in the Month of LibreOffice, May 2025! Over the next four weeks, hundreds of people around the world will collaborate to improve the software – and you can help them. There are many ways to get involved, as you’ll see in a second.

And best of all: everyone who contributes to LibreOffice in May can claim a cool sticker pack, and has the chance to win extra LibreOffice merchandise such as mugs, hoodies, T-shirts, rucksacks and more (we’ll choose 10 participants at random at the end):

How to take part

There are many ways you can help out – and you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…

  • Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers. We also monitor the users@ mailing list too.
  • First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: Go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 11 and LibreOffice 25.2.3”.
  • Drum Beater, spreading the word: Tell everyone about LibreOffice on Mastodon, Bluesky or X (Twitter)! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.
  • Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

We’ll be updating this page every few days with usernames across our various services, as people contribute. So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker pack at the end as thanks from us! And who knows, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to win bonus merch as well…

So let’s get going! We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon, Bluesky and X (Twitter) accounts over the next four weeks – stay tuned…

LibreOffice project and community recap: April 2025

Screenshot of participants in Document Freedom Day online talk

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

  • We started the month by posting a video from Document Freedom Day celebrations with the Nepalese LibreOffice community. Here it is:

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Photo of Budapest with the river and parliament (Photo credit: JStolp on Pixabay)

Winners of LibreOffice merchandise at Prague InstallFest 2025

TDF Annual Report 2024 banner

LibreOffice stand at Augsburger Linux-InfoDay 2025

ODF logo and map of Europe with Germany highlighted

Keep in touch – follow us on Mastodon, Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter), Reddit and Facebook. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join our community and help to make LibreOffice even better!

Germany committing to ODF and open document standards

ODF logo and map of Europe highlighting Germany

Digital sovereignty is of vital importance for data freedom. If governments and organisations use proprietary or pseudo-standard formats, they limit the tools that citizens can use to access data.

So we’re happy to see that the IT Planning Council in Germany is committing to move to the Open Document Format – a fully standardised format (and the default used in LibreOffice). The German IT Planning Council is a 17-member committee consisting of representatives of Germany’s federal government and the state governments. They say:

Open formats and open interfaces are an important building block for the necessary transformation process of public administration in Germany on the path to greater digital sovereignty and innovation.

The IT Planning Council is committed to ensuring that open formats such as the Open Document Format (ODF) are increasingly used in public administration and become the standard for document exchange by 2027. It is commissioning the Standardization Board to implement this.

More information (in German) on this page. Also see the updates from Schleswig-Holstein moving to LibreOffice.

TDF’s Annual Report 2024 – LibreOffice Conference

LibreOffice Conference 2024 group photo

The LibreOffice Conference is the annual gathering of the community, our end-users, developers, and everyone interested in free office software. In 2024, it took place in Luxembourg

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

This was our third in-person conference after the COVID pandemic, following on from the Milan conference in 2022 and Bucharest conference in 2023, but we also lived-streamed sessions so that participants could watch remotely (and ask questions in our chat channels too).

The conference took place from 10 – 12 October 2024 in Belval, Esch-sur-Alzette, which is around a 20 minute train ride from Luxembourg City. As public transport is free in the whole country, attendees staying in the city didn’t need to buy tickets to attend the event in Belval.

Conference Tracks and extra sessions

Opening sessions were given by Eliane Domingos (chairperson of the Board of Directors at TDF), Serge Linkels (Managing Director of the Digital Learning Hub and 42 Luxembourg), and Stéphanie Obertin (Luxembourg’s Minister for Digitalisation and Minister for Research and Higher Education).

Then there were presentations and talks were given across various “tracks”, or categories: LibreOffice Development; ODF and Interoperability; LibreOffice Design and Accessibility; and LibreOffice Marketing. There were highly technical talks focused on specific areas of LibreOffice and source code, along with more open discussions about community building and recent updates from The Document Foundation.

The conference also had some extra tracks to broaden its scope beyond just LibreOffice, and raise awareness about free and open source software (cybersecurity, EdTech and Open Source Program Office).

A workshop for new developers was held in parallel with the main tracks over the three days of the conference, and many different things around LibreOffice development were discussed, including: bug reporting and triaging; Git and Gerrit basics; building LibreOffice from its source code; and automation via scripting.

Sponsoring and merchandise

Partner sponsors were Collabora Productivity, Passbolt and SnT (University of Luxembourg), while venue sponsors were Digital Learning Hub and 42 Luxembourg. The Luxembourg Media & Digital Design Centre organised the EdTech track, and local supporters were Business Events Luxembourg, LU-CIX, LIST and Luxembourg House of Cybersecurity. Thanks to the sponsors, attendees could get merchandise at the event, including T-shirts with the conference logo.

Full programme and videos

Full details about the event are available on our main conference website. For a quick overview of all the talks, including links to PDF versions of the presentations, see the schedule. 63 videos – covering almost all of the talks are available as a playlist on our YouTube channel:

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Conference in 2025

Planning is already underway for the LibreOffice Conference 2025, which will take place in Budapest from September 1 – 5, following a vote from TDF members. Stay tuned to this blog for more details soon…

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!