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Author: Mike Saunders

German LibreOffice community meeting, March 2023 in Essen

Members sitting at a table

LibreOffice is developed by a worldwide community, and many members of this community live in German-speaking countries. From 24 to 26 March, some of them met at the Linuxhotel in Essen. There was an informal meeting on Friday evening, while the main discussions started on Saturday. The topics included:

  • Further development of the Base database module
  • LibreOffice community at free software events
  • Flyers and donations
  • UX improvement possibilities
  • Status of the German LibreOffice project

Delicious food

It was a nice meeting, even if some couldn’t be there, and hopefully we’ll see each other again at events like FrOSCon – and of course the LibreOffice Conference in Bucharest in September!

Members sitting at a table

LibreOffice 7.5.2 Community available for download

LibreOffice 7.5 banner

Berlin, March 30, 2023 – LibreOffice 7.5.2 Community, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 7.5 line, the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, is available from from our download page for Windows (Intel/AMD and ARM processors), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel processors), and Linux.

Most Significant New Features of the LibreOffice 7.5 Family

GENERAL

  • Major improvements to dark mode support
  • New application and MIME-type icons, more colorful and vibrant
  • The Start Centre can filter documents by type
  • An improved version of the Single Toolbar UI has been implemented
  • PDF Export improved with several fixes, and new options and features
  • Support for font embedding on macOS
  • Improvements to the Font Features dialog with several new options
  • Addition of a zoom slider at the bottom right of the macro editor

WRITER

  • Bookmarks have been significantly improved, and are also much more visible
  • Objects can be marked as decorative, for better accessibility
  • New types added to content controls, which also improve the quality of PDF forms
  • A new automatic accessibility checker option has been added to the Tools menu
  • Initial machine translation is available, based on DeepL translate APIs
  • Several spell checking improvements

CALC

  • Data tables are now supported in charts
  • The Function Wizard now lets you search by descriptions
  • “Spell out” number formats have been added
  • Conditional formatting conditions are now case insensitive
  • Correct behavior when entering numbers with a single prefix quote (‘)

IMPRESS & DRAW

  • New set of default table styles, and creation of table styles
  • Table styles can be customized, saved as master elements and exported
  • Objects can be drag-and-dropped in the navigator
  • It is now possible to crop inserted videos in the slide and still play them
  • The presenter console can also run as a normal window instead of fullscreen

A description of all new features in the LibreOffice 7.5 family is available in the Release Notes.

Screenshot showing tabbed interface

Based on the distinctive features of the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, LibreOffice 7.5 provides a large number of improvements and new features targeted at users sharing documents with Microsoft Office or migrating from Microsoft Office. These users should check new releases of LibreOffice on a regular basis, as the progress is so fast, that each new version improves dramatically over the previous one.

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.

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with a large number of dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLA (Service Level Agreements).

Availability of LibreOffice 7.5.2 Community

LibreOffice 7.5.2 Community is available from our download page. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.14. LibreOffice Technology-based products for Android and iOS are listed here.

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. Professional support is also available.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation.

Change log pages: RC1 and RC2

We were at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2023!

LibreOffice booth

In the LibreOffice community, most of our activities take place online: development, design, QA, localisation, marketing and so forth. But we like to meet face-to-face too, at events and conferences – and last weekend we did just that, at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2023 in Germany.

We had a booth with LibreOffice materials (flyers, stickers, pens and books):

Booth materials

As it was a Linux and free software-oriented event, almost all participants already knew about (and used) LibreOffice, but they had lots of interesting questions about our project.

Linux-Tage logo

Some visitors to our booth told us about deployments of LibreOffice in their businesses and organisations, while others talked to us about interesting use cases of LibreOffice in education and other areas.

Thanks to the Linux-Tage organisers for a great meetup! Now we’re looking forward to more events this year – and especially the LibreOffice Conference 2023 in September… 😊

Participants talking to each other

Czech translation of LibreOffice Base Guide – and more news

Base Guide cover

Zdeněk Crhonek (aka “raal”) from the Czech LibreOffice community writes:

The Czech team translated the LibreOffice Base Guide 7.3 – and it’s now available on the documentation page. Our team consists of three translators: Petr Kuběj, Radomír Strnad and Zdeněk Crhonek, along with localized screenshot maker Roman Toman, and Miloš Šrámek, who prepared machine translations.

A second bit of news related to guides and documentation is that Stanislav Horáček created a Czech Bookshelf page. The Bookshelf is a project of LibreOffice’s Documentation team, where the guides are converted to HTML web pages. Stanislav created an automated script, and made the first conversion of the “Getting Started Guide” Czech translation. After polishing the script, he plans to convert all Czech guides.

Many thanks to everyone in the Czech community for their work! Learn more about LibreOffice’s documentation project here.

LibreOffice Technology being piloted at the European Data Protection Supervisor

LibreOffice Technology diagram

Data protection and privacy is very important to us – and our users – in the LibreOffice project, so we’re happy to see that the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) is piloting the use of LibreOffice Technology.

The EDPS is the European Union’s (EU) independent data protection authority, which monitors and ensures the protection of personal data and privacy when EU institutions and bodies process the information of individuals. From their announcement:

In February 2023, the EDPS has started piloting the use of the Open Source Software Nextcloud and Collabora Online (based on LibreOffice technology). Together, they offer the possibility to share files, send messages, make video calls, and allows collaborative drafting, in a secured cloud environment.

This pilot project is part of a wider initiative, looking at alternatives to large-scale service providers to ensure better compliance with EU regulation 2018/1725 (covering the processing of personal data). We look forward to seeing the progress and results.

Click here for the full announcement

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