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LibreOffice in Luxembourg: Ready for work

LibreOffice is available in over 100 languages, giving billions of people access to high-quality productivity tools, all across the globe. And now we’re adding Luxembourg to the list, with a new spell-checker extensions for Luxembourgish (Lëtzebuergesch).

The extension is available to download on this page.

Michel Weimerskirch, the extension’s maintainer, explains more: “My goal is to provide good quality spell-checking tools for the Luxembourgish language. LibreOffice is available on all major platforms for free, and also has the necessary programming interfaces I needed to even implement a phonological rule that could now be implemented using standard spell checking libraries. Over the past few years LibreOffice has grown to become a very mature office suite, so nowadays there is definitely no reason to not use it in a professional environment.”

Paolo Vecchi, a local LibreOffice supporter – and recently elected as member of the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation – worked with Michel Weimerskirch to publish the new dictionary on the LibreOffice extensions portal, and will coordinate with the local Government and European institutions established in Luxembourg to help them upgrade to the
most complete and professional open source office suite.

Many local governments, organisations and companies around the world use LibreOffice every day – check out a selection here.

Performance-focused LibreOffice 6.4 is available for download

Berlin, January 29, 2020 – The Document Foundation announces the availability of LibreOffice 6.4, a new major release providing better performance, especially when opening and saving spreadsheets and presentations, and excellent compatibility with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files.

LibreOffice offers the strongest compatibility in the office suite arena, starting from native support for the Open Document Format (ODF) – with superior security and interoperability features over proprietary formats – to almost perfect support for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. In addition, LibreOffice includes filters for many legacy document formats, and as such is the best interoperability tool in the market.

In addition, the new version provides some interesting new features [1]:

GENERAL

  • Application icons have been added to document thumbnails inside the Start Center, making it easier to recognise the different types of documents.
  • A QR Code generator has been added to the suite, making it easy to add QR codes – that can be read by mobile devices – to documents.
  • Hyperlink context menus have been unified throughout the suite, and now provide the following menu entries: Open Hyperlink, Edit Hyperlink, Copy Hyperlink Location and Remove Hyperlink.
  • The new Automatic Redaction feature lets your hide classified or sensitive data in a document based on text or regular expression matches.
  • The help system provides faster and more precise search results, while many help pages have localized screenshots for a better user experience.

WRITER

  • A Table panel has been added to the Sidebar.
  • Comments can now be marked as resolved. In addition, it’s now possible to add comments to images and charts inside text documents.
  • Cutting, copying and pasting of tables has been improved, with a new Paste Special menu option “Paste as Nested Table”.

CALC

  • Spreadsheets can be exported into a single PDF page, to get an overview of all content without it being spread over multiple pages.

IMPRESS & DRAW

  • In the Shape menu, a new option called Consolidate Text combines multiple selected text boxes into a single one. This is useful if you’re importing a PDF and the text content is split across many boxes.

LIBREOFFICE ONLINE

  • In Writer, table properties can be easily modified from the sidebar, and the document Table of Contents can be fully managed by users.
  • In Calc, the Function Wizard is now offering full features, and a wide range of options for selected charts has been added to the spreadsheet sidebar.

LibreOffice 6.4 is the first new release available in 2020. During the year, the community will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the best free office suite ever at several Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) events in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Several volunteers will present the project milestones and discuss the future of the office suite, on the desktop and in the cloud.

LibreOffice 6.4’s new features have been developed by a large community of code contributors: 75% of commits are from developers employed by companies sitting in the Advisory Board like Collabora, Red Hat and CIB, plus other organizations, and 25% are from individual volunteers.

In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking care of other fundamental activities such as quality assurance, software localization, user interface design and user experience, editing of help system and documentation, plus free software and open document standards advocacy.

A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 6.4 is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4boEj8S2JQ

LibreOffice for individual users

LibreOffice 6.4 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. The Document Foundation does not provide any technical support to users, although they can get help from other users on mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org
For users whose main objective is personal productivity and therefore prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the new features, The Document Foundation maintains the LibreOffice 6.3 family, which includes some months of back-ported fixes. The current version is LibreOffice 6.3.4.

LibreOffice in business

For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommend sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and other benefits, including Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Also, the work done by ecosystem partners flows back into the LibreOffice project, benefiting everyone.

For migrations and training from proprietary office suites, professional support should be sourced from certified professionals who provide value-added services which extend the reach of the community to the corporate world and offer CIOs and IT managers a solution in line with proprietary offerings.

In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.4

LibreOffice 6.4 is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.9. Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate

LibreOffice 6.4 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org

[1] A more comprehensive list of LibreOffice 6.4 new features is available on the Release Notes wiki page: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/6.4

Press Kit

The press kit, including the white paper on document formats and high-resolution screenshots, is here: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/ZA4Y67yz6jBJSqz

ODF 1.3 approved as OASIS Committee Specification

OASIS is pleased to announce that Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.3 from the OpenDocument TC has been approved as an OASIS Committee Specification.

The OpenDocument Format is an open XML-based document file format for office applications, to be used for documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical elements. OpenDocument Format v1.3 is an update to the international standard Version 1.2, which was approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 26300 in 2015. OpenDocument Format v1.3 includes improvements for document security, clarifies underspecifications and makes other timely improvements.

The OpenDocument Format specifies the characteristics of an open XML-based application-independent and platform-independent digital document file format, as well as the characteristics of software applications which read, write and process such documents. It is applicable to document authoring, editing, viewing, exchange and archiving, including text documents, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, drawings, charts and similar documents commonly used by personal productivity software applications.

This Committee Specification is an OASIS deliverable, completed and approved by the TC and fully ready for testing and implementation.

The prose specifications and related files are available on the OASIS website.

Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.3

Part 1: Introduction
Editable source (Authoritative): https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part1-introduction/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part1-introduction.odt. HTML:
https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part1-introduction/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part1-introduction.html. PDF: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part1-introduction/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part1-introduction.pdf

Part 2: Packages
Editable source (Authoritative): https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part2-packages/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part2-packages.odt. HTML: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part2-packages/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part2-packages.html. PDF: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part2-packages/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part2-packages.pdf

Part 3: OpenDocument Schema
Editable source (Authoritative): https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part3-schema/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part3-schema.odt. HTML: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part3-schema/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part3-schema.html. PDF: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part3-schema/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part3-schema.pdf

Part 4: Recalculated Formula (OpenFormula) Format
Editable source (Authoritative): https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part4-formula/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part4-formula.odt. HTML: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part4-formula/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part4-formula.html. PDF: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/part4-formula/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01-part4-formula.pdf

XML/RNG schemas and OWL ontologies: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/schemas/

For your convenience, OASIS provides a complete package of the prose specification and related files in a ZIP distribution file. You can download the ZIP file at: https://docs.oasis-open.org/office/OpenDocument/v1.3/cs01/OpenDocument-v1.3-cs01.zip

Members of the OpenDocument TC approved this specification by Special Majority Vote. The specification had been released for public review as required by the TC Process. The vote to approve as a Committee Specification passed, and the document is now available online in the OASIS Library as referenced above.

10/20: LibreOffice 10th anniversary in 2020, a year long celebration

LibreOffice was announced on September 28, 2010, with a positive feedback from tech and business media all over the world (above, two significant titles from eWeek and Linux Gizmos). To celebrate the event, The Document Foundation has organized a year long anniversary project, starting at FOSDEM in Brussels on February 1/2 and ending at POSS in Paris in early December 2020.

LibreOffice community members will attend as many FOSS events as possible, carrying stickers and swag with the anniversary logo. The author is Rania Amina from Indonesia, a member of the LibreOffice community who has already contributed with logos and 2D animations to the success of LibreOffice Indonesia Conference in 2018.

Rania Amina will attend FOSDEM in Brussels, and will also talk about the LibreOffice Theme Changer at the Open Document Editors DevRoom.

So far, in addition to FOSDEM and POSS, events have been confirmed in Nigeria (Open Source Africa), Kosovo (FLOSSK), Croatia (DORS/CLUC), Albania (OSCAL), France (Libre Graphics Meeting and OW2con), Taiwan (COSCUP and LibreOffice Asia Conference), India (Open Source India), Germany (Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, FrOSCon and the LibreOffice Conference), US (All Things Open) and Serbia (PSSOH), but several other are being currently discussed and will be announced as soon as possible.

Stay tuned !!! 2020 will be an exciting time for the LibreOffice community !!!

The LibreOffice Documentation Team Announces the LibreOffice Online Guide

Berlin, December 12, 2019 – The LibreOffice Documentation Team announces the immediate availability of the LibreOffice Online Guide, a major work authored by Aaron Peters under the Google Season of Docs 2019 programme. LibreOffice Online is a web-based version of the office suite, that can be deployed on local infrastructure and connected to a file-sharing system for document collaboration.

LibreOffice Online 6.3 Guide

The guide includes content for end-users – as well as for system administrators – for rapid deployment and start of operation. It covers the basic usage of the word processor, spreadsheet and presentation modules, as well as guides for file handling and – one of the major technological achievements of LibreOffice Online – the collaborative editing capability, that allows several users to work on the same document, spreadsheet or presentation at the same time. Users familiar with LibreOffice on the desktop will quickly grasp the operation of LibreOffice Online, except for some specific differences addressed in the guide.

For the system administrator, the guide covers installation and basic operation, and explains deployment in small and limited environments. Professional support and operation services are strongly recommended for large installations and mission critical deployments, available in the LibreOffice business ecosystem.

“The current version of the Guide is complete and has the necessary information for the targeted audience (technology-savvy enthusiasts and/or small businesses), to be able to get the application, install it alongside a hosting application (NextCloud), use the main modules (Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations), and use other desktop and mobile tools to access their LibreOffice Online content,” says author Aaron Peters. “My experience working on this guide was fantastic, and I would urge anyone interested in getting involved with open source to consider documentation as a first step. The Document Foundation’s documentation team in particular has a very well-established process and infrastructure for producing their products, and one of the only things I can think of that would help them is more volunteers.”

“The Google Season of Docs programme was an opportunity The Document Foundation (TDF) could not have miss to add a valuable content to its documentation portfolio. The LibreOffice Online Guide is a document whose time had just come and is here to help the LibreOffice Online software and its professional and volunteer community to increase its usage and benefit of its incredible value,” says Olivier Hallot, TDF mentor and Documentation Coordinator. “And working with Aaron was a pleasure and all commitments were delivered on time, which was very appreciated. Special thank you to Google for the wonderful initiative and to the Season of Docs 2019 team for the support.”

The outline of the new Guide is as follows and gives a good view on what is inside.

  • Preface
  • Chapter 1: Introducing LibreOffice Online
  • Chapter 2: Installing LibreOffice Online
  • Chapter 3: Setting Up LibreOffice Online Before Use
  • Chapter 4: Navigating Your LibreOffice Online Files
  • Chapter 5: Editing, Saving, and Exporting LibreOffice Online Files
  • Chapter 6: The Documents Module
  • Chapter 7: The Spreadsheets Module
  • Chapter 8: The Presentations Module
  • Chapter 9: Integrating with LibreOffice Online

The guide is available for download at the documentation website at https://documentation.libreoffice.org/en/english-documentation/

 

LibreOffice 6.3.4 available for download

Berlin, December 12, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3.4, the 4th minor release of the LibreOffice 6.3 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, who are invited to update their current version. LibreOffice 6.3.4 includes over 120 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.

LibreOffice 6.3.4’s change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.3.4/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.3.4/RC2 (changed in RC2).

LibreOffice’s individual users are helped by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

LibreOffice in business

For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommend sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and other benefits, including Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Also, the work done by ecosystem partners flows back into the LibreOffice project, benefiting everyone.

Also, support for migrations and trainings should be sourced from certified professionals who provide value-added services which extend the reach of the community to the corporate world and offer CIOs and IT managers a solution in line with proprietary offerings.

In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.3.4

LibreOffice 6.3.4 is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements are specified on the download page. TDF builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/.

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server-based platform, and should be installed and configured by adding cloud storage and an SSL certificate. It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud services offered by ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations.

All versions of LibreOffice are built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

Support LibreOffice

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card or other tools at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

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