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Author: Olivier Hallot

Taming LibreOffice 6.1’s New Help System

or… the Help must help.

LibreOffice 6.1 has been released and carries a refactored and improved new Help system, based on modern browser technologies. Let’s explore what this new help brought to LibreOffice.

The main driver of the new Help is our vision that the Help must help. When we look at the old help system from the perspective of a typical user, we realize quickly that the text and layout of the help pages don’t provide the best experience. So how can we improve the experience and help our users better? The diagnostic was straightforward: the LibreOffice Help system was tied to a very limited technology, so we had to unleash LibreOffice Help.

The approach was to look at the capabilities of modern browser technologies of 2018, and compare them to the aging help system that relied on 2000’s web standards. Until LibreOffice 6.1, the local help consisted of static description text, very few images, no multimedia and almost no easy support for evolution and improvements.

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Guide Revision Sprint Week

We are announcing a Revision Sprint Week, starting Monday May 21st and ending on Sunday May 27th to review the contents of all chapters of the Getting Started Guide 6.0.

The task consist of downloading a chapter and review it. Then send it back to documentation at libreoffice dot org when revision is finished.

Volunteers are invited to visit our Wiki page and have a deep reading on the contents.

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Please use our communication channels described there to access us for interaction.

Happy Revision Sprint Week!

Rich Contents Arrives in New Help

Last week the new help system – online and offline – received enhancements to add multimedia and other resources for a richer user experience of LibreOffice Help. The new help can now access external videos stored in You Tube or similar services and also to open or download OpenDocument files to support the textual explanations of LibreOffice features in the help pages.

External videos can be displayed in New Help pages

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Making Macro Programming a Breeze: The BASIC & API Reference Cards

Update: Reference card for runtime library is now available.

One of the recurring issue when using LibreOffice as a replacement of other office applications is the migration of macros to the LibreOffice BASIC dialect and objects. While the LibreOffice BASIC programming language is almost standard, the objects inside a document have different names, methods and properties, and a rework on the macro is necessary in most cases to make it operational again, when imported from other suites.

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The LibreOffice Mardi Gras Party for Help: What’s new and fun in online Help?

Starting with the recent release of the 6.0 family, LibreOffice has now a brand new online help system. Unlike the previous version – based on the transfer of help content to the Mediawiki framework hosted by The Document Foundation – the new help is a direct transformation of the help XML files into simple HTML files, with additions of some JavaScript magic and CSS wizardry.

But how do I get this new help online? Actually it is quite easy. Either you navigate in your browser to https://help.libreoffice.org/6.0/ from your desktop or smartphone or you just don’t install the local help packages in your computer. When the local help is not installed, LibreOffice calls the online help, passing parameters that includes the dialog box identification or UNO command, operating system language and version. Your default browser will open the correct page at the right line position.

What is new in this help online? By working on the XML transformation targeted at modern browsers, LibreOffice developers were able to insert many nice features in the pages. Here are a few, just for a start:

The top header contains two drop-down lists, one to select the module and the second to select the language of the pages. These two lists are there to let you navigate in all help domains. If you want to read the help content in another language, just select the language in the list. There are as many as 50 languages available (not every Help page is fully translated in some languages). (more…)

Documentation Community Releases Writer Guide 5.4

Internet, January 29th, 2018. The LibreOffice documentation community is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the Writer Guide 5.4, with all innovations and enhancements of LibreOffice 5.4. The guide is an in-depth reorganization and revision of the Writer Guide 4.2. The work was lead by Jean Hollis Weber, with collaboration from Cathy Crumbley and Bruce Byfield.

The book is targeted to end users, who look for advanced techniques for contents production, maintainability and update of text documents, unleashing the full power of a leading edge, solid word processor.

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Press Releases

LibreOffice 26.2 is here: a faster, more polished office suite that you control

We’re pleased to announce the release of LibreOffice 26.2, the newest version of the free and open source office suite…

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    Berlin, 18 December 2025 – LibreOffice 25.8.4, the fourth minor update to the free office suite developed by volunteers for…

  • Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.3

    Berlin, 13 November 2025 - LibreOffice 25.8.3, the third minor release of the free, volunteer-supported office suite for personal productivity…

Open Document Format

Why OOXML is not a standard format for office documents

Unfortunately, I keep reading about open-source software advocates who happily use Microsoft's proprietary DOCX, XLSX and PPTX formats for their…