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Author: Mike Saunders

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!

LibreOffice in 2024 – TDF’s Annual Report

TDF Annual Report 2024 banner

In 2024, LibreOffice celebrated its fourteenth birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well

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

LibreOffice 24.2

On January 31, LibreOffice 24.2 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at The Document Foundation, Collabora, allotropia, CIB, Red Hat, NISZ and other companies and organisations – along with volunteers – worked on many new features.

For instance, there were many improvements to the tabbed “NotebookBar” user interface, while styles support was added for comments. A new search field was added to the Functions sidebar deck in Calc, while in terms of accessibility, several significant improvements to the handling of mouse positions and the presentation of dialogue boxes via the Accessibility APIs were made, allowing screen readers to present them correctly. And regarding security, the “Sace with Password” dialogue box now has a password strength meter, which uses zxcvbn-c to determine the password strength.

TDF’s marketing and localisation community produced and translated a video (below) which demonstrated many of the new features in LibreOffice 24.2. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release. The video is also available on PeerTube.

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LibreOffice 24.8

Later in the year, on August 22, TDF released LibreOffice 24.8. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provided a large number of interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats.

In terms of features, this release added many improvements to the Navigator in Writer, including ding cross-references by drag-and-drop items, deleting footnotes and endnotes, and indicating images with broken links. In Calc, the functions FILTER, LET, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, XLOOKUP and XMATCH were added, along with chart types “Pie-of-Pie” and “Bar-of-Pie” which break down a slice of a pie as a pie or bar sub-chart respectively (this also enables import of such charts from OOXML files created with Microsoft Office/365).

Many other features were added as well, and there were a large number of compatibility improvements. As with the previous release, TDF staff worked with the marketing ad localisation communities to make a video (also on PeerTube) to demonstrate some of the new features.

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Regular improvements

We also released 14 minor updates with bug and security fixes:

  • LibreOffice 7.6.5 – February 22
  • LibreOffice 24.2.1 – February 29
  • LibreOffice 7.6.6 and 24.2.2 – March 28
  • LibreOffice 24.2.3 – May 2
  • LibreOffice 7.6.7 – May 10
  • LibreOffice 24.2.4 – June 6
  • LibreOffice 24.2.5 – July 11
  • LibreOffice 24.2.6 – September 5
  • LibreOffice 24.8.1 – September 12
  • LibreOffice 24.8.2 – September 27
  • LibreOffice 24.2.7 – October 31
  • LibreOffice 24.8.3 – November 14
  • LibreOffice 24.8.4 – December 19

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

Press Releases

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 25.8.7

Berlin, 12 May 2026 - The Document Foundation announces the release of LibreOffice 25.8.7, the final maintenance release of the…

Open Document Format

There is no digital sovereignty without ODF

Any other choice is a choice of dependence on a single vendor Digital sovereignty begins with the document format. Everything…