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Author: Mike Saunders

LibreOffice 6.1: A week in stats

On August 8, we announced LibreOffice 6.1, a new version of the suite with many great features and updates created by our worldwide community. Let’s look at some stats from the last week!

373,758 downloads

These are just stats for our official downloads page, of course – some Linux users will have acquired the new release via their distribution’s package repositories. And we still offer the LibreOffice 6.0 branch which is especially suited to enterprise deployments.

274,916 visits to our website

Our main website is the central resource for all things LibreOffice, including downloads, release notes, help, community support and more.

192,232 visits to our blog

Most of these were for the release announcement, but we’ve been posting other updates as well. On a related note, if you want to follow blog posts by other members of the LibreOffice community, check out the TDF Planet.

18,738 views of our New Features video

We made a video highlighting the new features in LibreOffice 6.1, with an awesome introduction created by our Taiwanese community. This video was embedded into various news websites that covered the release.

21,347 impressions of the announcement tweet

We use Twitter to spread the word about LibreOffice, free software and open standards, so a big thanks to our supporters who retweeted the announcement. It had 197 retweets and 269 likes.

Over 32,000 views of our Reddit “Ask us Anything”

One day after the release, team and board members from The Document Foundation, along with some community members, organised an “Ask us Anything” session on the /r/linux subreddit. This was an opportunity for free software and GNU/Linux fans to ask us all about the new release, and indeed anything else about LibreOffice. We had 205 comments and 312 upvotes.

But there’s more to come!

A huge thanks to our community for making LibreOffice 6.1 happen! But we’re not done yet; we’re already busy adding new features and updates to LibreOffice 6.2, which is due for release early next year – and you can help out! Whether it’s with design, marketing, documentation, coding or translations, you can get involved, join our friendly community and make a big difference to LibreOffice. Come join us!

Community Member Monday: Sam Tuke

Over the last few years we’ve posted many LibreOffice contributor interviews on this blog. Today, we catch up with Sam Tuke who is a member of the marketing community and helps out with QA too…

Where do you live, and are you active on IRC/social media?

I live in Berlin, Germany. Originally I’m from Suffolk, England. I like Twitter and Mastodon for community news. For my business, which makes Free Software newsletter app phpList, I use Facebook and Telegram too.

In which areas of the LibreOffice project are you active?

The marketing team, and filing occasional bugs.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

While in high school I started a small business building computers for local people. They needed an office suite to come with their new PCs, and OpenOffice.org was the perfect fit. I’ve been a user and advocate ever since, following my friends to LibreOffice when it was established.

Later on I became a full time Free Software developer, and after that a campaigner. From 2014 I worked on marketing LibreOffice-related products at Collabora. It was an exiting time and I had the opportunity to announce LibreOffice for Android and LibreOffice Online.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

Much like other open source apps: find and use a complicated bug tracker to report an annoying problem. But I was encouraged by quick follow up by a friendly bug triager, and since then several issues that I reported have been fixed and released. Satisfying!

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

Marketing. It’s a brilliant software suite which offers great potential value to most people alive today, particularly when you consider the mobile and web-based products. Reaching all those people who stand to benefit from LibreOffice is hard work, but it’s worth doing. Italo Vignoli and Mike Saunders have been making strides in this direction, and that’s fantastic to see.

Also: focus. With so many different kinds of users out there, LibreOffice can suffer from being too powerful for it’s own good. LibreOffice has had the benefit of contributions from a variety of usability experts and professionals. There’s plenty more to do, but recent releases, and particularly LibreOffice 6.1 include gratifying improvements from Kendy, Heiko, Andreas and others, which I’m eager to see.

What tools do you use for your work?

Markdown everywhere: Gedit, Writer, Nextcloud notes, and Pandoc to convert between them. Sometimes I also use Thorsten’s odpdown to make presentations.

Calc handles internal financial reporting at the firm, with many charts, and a few arcane formulas which LibreOffice fortunately includes. Draw is great for quick colourful diagrams like server infrastructure and organisational charts.

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

Since finishing a Master’s degree in spring I’ve become a mentor of startups in West Africa, and had time so speak at more Free Software conferences at home and abroad. In order to keep up with new interns at work I’ve also been reading textbooks on marketing and security – perfect for long sunny evenings in the park.

Thanks Sam! Stay tuned to the blog for more interviews. In the meantime, if you’re new to the LibreOffice project and want to help us make it even better, start here!

LibreOffice monthly recap: July 2018

There’s a lot going on in the LibreOffice community, in the lead up to LibreOffice 6.1, in development, documentation, design, QA, translations and much more. Here’s a summary of news and updates in July…

  • Preparations for LibreOffice 6.1 continued, with the final Bug Hunting Session on July 6. Users around the world helped to test new features and report bugs so that they can be fixed before the final release – thanks to everyone who took part!

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  • Another Bug Hunting Session took place in July, this time with the Turkish LibreOffice community. 15 people were present, and tested the software for three hours. See the full report here.

  • TDF published its Annual Report for 2017. This describes activities in and around the LibreOffice and Document Liberation projects, and provides additional information on how donations to TDF have been used. Read it here.
  • Later in the month, we described how automated tools and the volunteer contribution of security specialists are constantly improving the quality of LibreOffice’s source code. Check out the blog post for full details.
  • Finally, our Albanian community is organising the LibreOffice Conference 2018, which will take place from September 25 – 28 in Tirana, Albania. Come and join us – register today! Here’s a quick video overview of what to expect:

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Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help us to make LibreOffice even better!

Results from the LibreOffice 6.1 RC1 Bug Hunting Session in Ankara

Question: Who can help to improve LibreOffice for millions of users around the world?
Answer: Anyone!

For instance, the Turkish LibreOffice community recently organised a Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.1 Release Candidate 1, to find and fix issues before the final release in early August.

Muhammet Kara helped to organise the event, and here’s his summary:

  • Around 15 people were present, and they tested LibreOffice for three hours. Multiple bugs were discovered. Some were reported, some were discussed, others were prepared for reports later.
  • Muhammet talked about “how to report bugs” for about 15 minutes, showing the LibreOffice Bugzilla installation.
  • There were Pardus, Debian, Windows and macOS machines (and possibly Fedora). Participants cross-checked issues on multiple platforms simultaneously.
  • After the session, there was a long discussion on community and ecosystem building for LibreOffice in Turkey.

So a big thanks to the Turkish community for their help! Check out some more photos below. And as mentioned, anyone can get involved and help to identify issues in LibreOffice – you don’t need to be a developer. See here to get started, and millions of users around the world appreciate your work!

Join us at the LibreOffice Conference 2018 in Tirana!

Yes, this year’s LibreOffice Conference takes place from September 25 – 28 in Albania. Register today, meet our community, and have fun! Here’s a quick preview:

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Live LibreOffice 6.1 RC1 Bug Hunting Session in Ankara on July 13

LibreOffice 6.1 is approaching, and the Turkish community is organising an RC1 Bug Hunting Session in Ankara on July 13. Here are the details:

  • Time: 14:00-17:00 (UTC+3)
  • Location: TUBITAK ULAKBIM, 7th Floor, Meeting Room 2
  • Registration form

Attendees will bring their own laptops. Registration until Thursday 17:00 (UTC+3) is required. There will be snacks, tea, and some swag! So if you’re in (or around) Ankara, join our friendly community, and let’s make LibreOffice 6.1 the best release ever!

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