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The New Writer Guide 26.2 Just Arrived

Continuing our mission to provide the best LibreOffice documentation for our end users, the Documentation Team is proud to announce the release of the latest Writer Guide for LibreOffice 26.2.

Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, this guide covers all aspects of the LibreOffice Writer module—from creating simple one-page document to full book using the best practice in text editing, text formatting and document compilation.

This guide is the result of teamwork by LibreOffice Community volunteers. We extend special thanks to Dione Maddern, Claire Wood, Miklos Vajna, Ed Olson, B. Antonio Fernandez, Peter Schofield and Olivier Hallot.

“This is our first edition of the Writer Guide using Nextcloud Deck to manage the production process. It has been a bit of a learning curve for our team, but it has greatly improved task tracking and communication.” Said Dione Maddern, volunteer Writer Guide coordinator.

 

Dione Maddern

The guide was updated from LibreOffice 25.8 and 26.2 and included several new sections on new features as well as contents on features not yet documented in the previous editions. The Guide is up to date with LibreOffice 26.2 release and included the following updates:

  • Chapter 2 – Working with Text: Basics: Updated to show improvements to the Hyphenation options in the Paragraph Style dialog.
  • Chapter 3 – Working with Text: Advanced: Documents improvements to Writer’s tracking of interdependent changes and documents the new Reject but track new.
  • Chapter 5 – Page Style Basics: Updated instructions for toggling the visibility of Boundaries and Formatting Aids and Page break examples moved from Chapter 8, Introduction to Styles.
  • Chapter 6 – Formatting pages: Advanced: Content on Using Document Themes moved to Chapter 9, Working with Styles.
  • Chapter 7 – Printing and Publishing: Updated information on standards for Reference XObjects.
  • Chapter 8 – Introduction to Styles: Fixed out-of-order sections and figures, and reordered some sections to improve flow and clarity. Improved sections on the Styles sidebar deck and Creating paragraph styles. Page styles examples moved to Chapter 5, Page Styles Basics. Removed obsolete passage about anchoring settings being unavailable for Frame styles.
  • Chapter 9 – Working with Styles: Added sections to document the Asian Typography, Asian Layout, and Text Grid features. Added a section to document the Inline Heading preset frame style. Removed obsolete section about character formatting.
  • Chapter 10 – Working with Templates: Improved introduction. Improved sections on Updating a document by loading styles from a template, Other ways to manage templates, Creating a document from a template, and Creating a template from a document.
  • Chapter 11 – Images and Graphics: Improved grammar and style in multiple sections. Added a section to document the Text within a shape feature.
  • Chapter 13 – Tables: Added contents on table calculations
  • Chapter 15 – Table of contents, Indexes and Bibliography: Updated nomenclature, Updated instructions for adding entries using the Bibliography Database window. Added a section on DOI References.
  • Chapter 16 – Master documents: Chapter was entirely rewritten to improve clarity, completeness, and flow.
  • Chapter 17 – Fields: Improved and clarified instructions on how to set and use variables fields.
  • Chapter 18 – Forms: Added instructions for exporting to PDF forms.
  • Chapter 19 – Spreadsheets, Charts, Other objects: Added instructions on how to create a chart from a writer table. Updated charts with data table addition.
  • Chapter 20 Customizing Writer: Added sections on the Allow text to be dragged and dropped and DeepL Server options. Improved the section on the Load printer settings with the document option.
  • Chapter 21 – User Interface Variants: Added a section documenting the Form tab in the Additional tabs section.
  • Appendix A – Keyboard Shortcuts: This new Appendix was added with most important shortcut for text editing and word processing operation, organized by actions.

The Writer Guide is available in PDF, ODT format and can be read on line as web pages. To access the Guide, readers can use the following

Our sense of meritocracy

Meritocracy is one of the founding principles of the free and open-source software movement. It is also one of the most controversial terms, and the gap between the different meanings people attribute to it is, in some projects, a source of real and damaging conflict.

Let us analyse the meaning of the word, because its potential ambiguity can significantly influence the debate and the various viewpoints.

The theory of legitimacy based on the commit graph

One version of meritocracy argues that governance authority should follow contribution, and that contribution is best measured through code. According to this view, the people who have contributed most to the code have the right to decide the project’s future, because they know the source code and have a personal stake in the most literal sense of the term.

This is not an unreasonable position for a project in its early stages. Although it is also necessary to consider infrastructure, raise funds, and manage relations with the media and institutions, when the main challenge is technical in nature, when the community is small, and when the stakes are low, it makes sense that those doing most of the work should also make most of the decisions.

The problem arises when the principle is carried forward unchanged into a very different context. A FOSS project that has been running for fifteen or twenty years, is used by millions of people, operates in a complex regulatory and legal environment, has enterprise users and political implications, is no longer the same thing. Applying the same governance from the early days to the reality of a large project does not produce good results, but rather a technically sophisticated and strategically blind organisation.

What the commit chart does not measure

The theory of meritocracy based on the number of commits has a blind spot: it measures only one type of contribution and renders others almost invisible.

Let’s consider what is not in the chart:

  • The authors of the documentation who made the software accessible to users who would otherwise have given up on using it.
  • The localisation team that involved entire linguistic communities in the project.
  • The reviewers who transformed rough bug reports into reports ready for resolution.The community moderators who kept the project welcoming to newcomers at the cost of considerable personal effort.
  • The people who spent years building relationships with media, institutions and the political sphere, creating the conditions for the software’s widespread adoption.

These contributions do not produce commits, but they do produce users, adoption, sustainability and relevance. In a mature project, they often make the difference between software that exists and software that matters.

A governance model that excludes these contributors from the decision-making process, or seeks to marginalise them, is a partial meritocracy in that it recognises only one type of excellence whilst ignoring all others.

The problem of conflicts of interest

There is a second dimension to this argument that merits analysis.

When a project’s governance also includes people employed by companies with direct commercial interests in the project’s direction, the issue of meritocracy becomes more complex. The question is not whether those contributors are capable—for they certainly are—but whether the governance structures built around their contributions can reliably produce decisions that serve the project’s mission rather than the interests of their employers.

This is not an accusation, but a simple observation. Conflicts of interest are not linked to bad faith, but are inherent in the situation. A governance model that fails to take this into account is no longer meritocratic, and is also less aware of its own limitations.

Healthy governance in a mature FOSS project requires a diversity of perspectives: people who contribute code, but also people who represent the user community, the institutional mission, and the long-term sustainability of the project as a public good rather than a commercial asset. It is not a question of excluding developers, but of ensuring that no single interest – however legitimate – is the sole factor determining decisions.

Building for those who come after us

All major FOSS projects are intergenerational, because the people who created them are not the ones who will sustain them in ten or twenty years’ time; therefore, the decisions made today regarding architecture, governance, and which contributions are valued and which are not will shape what the next generation inherits. And it must be something upon which to build, not something to be circumvented.

This completely redefines the issue of meritocracy. From this perspective, in fact, the measure of a contribution is not determined solely by its current value, but also by its value for the future of the project.

Meritocracy in a large open-source project does not lay in the accumulation of commits as a claim to authority, but in creating the best conditions for the project to continue growing in the future. The question is not who has done the most, but who is building something that the next generation can actually use and develop further.

Our sense of meritocracy

The original principle underpinning FOSS meritocracy remains valid: decisions must be made by those who do the work, who understand the consequences, and who have earned their place through genuine contribution rather than organisational politics. This principle must be preserved.

Contributions, however, can take many forms, and merit has a temporal dimension that the commit graph fails to capture. The merit of building the source code is real and deserves recognition, but this also applies to the merit of building a community, maintaining documentation, ensuring accessibility, navigating legal complexities, and securing the institutional relationships that keep the project alive for the people who will inherit it.

A true meritocracy finds a way to recognise and value all of this. A project that confuses meritocracy with the dominance of a single type of contributor, however expert, fails to live up to its own values. And a project that bends to the interests of a subset of contributors, at the expense of future generations, is not a meritocracy but a form of appropriation masked by the language of fairness.

Meritocracy is a complex, multifaceted concept that is worth grappling with in order to build something that future generations will be happy to inherit.

Let’s put an end to the speculation

Ideally, we would have preferred to avoid this post. However, the articles and comments published in response to Collabora’s and Michael Meeks’ biased posts compel us to provide this background information on the events that led to the current situation.

Unfortunately, we have to start from the very beginning, but we’ll try to keep it brief. The launch of the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation was handled with great enthusiasm by the founding group. They were driven by a noble goal, but also by a bit of healthy recklessness. After all, it was impossible to imagine what would happen after September 28, 2010, the date of the announcement.

At the time, nobody could imagine that the companies that had supported OpenOffice.org until then like IBM would create Apache OpenOffice to kill LibreOffice. Also, if the project were to be successful, it would require resources greater than those available, and above all, a deep management experience.

Fortunately, the project grew quite rapidly. However, the founders’ different backgrounds and opinions were at the same time the reason for some bold decisions – many of which right – as well as a few mistakes, which are the root cause of some of the current problems:

  • granting free use of the LibreOffice brand only to companies in the ecosystem, to allow them to sell the software in Microsoft and Apple’s online stores;
  • awarding contracts for the development of LibreOffice – new features, fixing “legacy” bugs, etc. – to companies whose representatives were on The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors, and who were active throughout the procurement process.

Both of these decisions were found to be incorrect for reasons relating to the non-profit law, to which The Document Foundation must adhere. They violated the law itself. When this fact was brought to the attention of the Board of Directors by the foundation’s legal counsels, the companies that had benefited from these errors sought to maintain the status quo rather than finding a solution. At the time – from the end of 2021 to the middle of 2022 – this could have been achieved swiftly and with minimal difficulty.

This attitude increased tensions within the BoD, adding to pre-existing frictions that began in 2020 when the majority of the new board decided to terminate the plan to transfer many of TDF’s tasks and assets to a parallel organisation called The Document Collective (TDC). Several issues that the current board had to solve stemmed from elements of that project that had been partially executed.

The origins of TDC are controversial. One reason given for setting up the parallel organisation was the “alleged inefficiency” of the TDF team [1], which was expressed by some of the directors. Unfortunately, instead of addressing the supposed problem with a reorganization or some training, the BoD decided to react by creating a new problem: a parallel structure with a supposedly “highly efficient” team that would highlight the alleged inefficiency of the TDF team.

TDC was presented at the LibreOffice Conference in Almería in 2019 without prior notice, raising concerns within the team and the community. This was partly because the parallel organisation’s project envisaged leveraging TDF’s financial resources as startup funds. This attempt resulted in permanent damage to relations between the project’s components, and especially between certain BoD members and the team.

After years of discussions marked by accusations and finger-pointing, during which no real progress was made in resolving the legal issues, the German authorities overlooking non profit foundations requested an audit whose results confirmed that resolving the issues was absolutely necessary to avoid losing non-profit status, with unforeseen consequences.

Unfortunately, the presence of company representatives on the Board of Directors (BoD), who were elected by employees of those same companies that are also TDF members, caused further delays to finding a solution, which has not yet been reached.

Fortunately, the introduction of restrictive measures – such as the decision to forfeit TDF membership status of Collabora employees – and the freezing of tenders, alongside the introduction of a robust procurement policy for development, has resulted in a positive outcome for the third audit [2]. At least, the BoD has demonstrated a willingness to break the deadlock that has persisted since 2022.

The board also reviewed governance issues from the past and set clear rules to minimise the risk of them recurring in future. These rules are set out in the Code of Ethics and Fiduciary Duties, the updated Conflict of Interest Policy and the Community Bylaws.

Of course, if we could rewind the course of history, some of the choices made since 2010 would hopefully be different and no one would repeat the mistakes or the wrong behaviours of the past.

As we said at the beginning, we would gladly have done without this post, but it was necessary to set the record straight and avoid speculation.

TDF has been preparing for some time for Collabora’s announcement, by hiring developers and exploring new partnership opportunities to support a growing interest in LibreOffice on the desktop, still a viable option for many deployments, the cloud and mobile, and in ODF as the preferred document format for governments worldwide.

Thanks to the growing importance of free and open source software, as well as open standards for document formats, the concepts that we have been advocating for over twenty years and have finally reached political institutions and users, The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project are well positioned for the future.

[1] The Document Foundation’s daily activities are managed by a team of employees and contractors who handle administrative tasks, infrastructure, release management and developer’s mentoring, and coordinate community, quality assurance, UX, documentation, localization and marketing.

[2] The first audit in 2023 raised concerns about the mentioned issues. The second audit in 2024 confirmed the concerns. The third audit in 2025 did not raise concerns.

Get the best of LibreOffice Calc with the Calc Guide 26.2

The LibreOffice documentation team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the Calc Guide 26.2.

Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, this guide covers all aspects of the LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet module—from creating simple shopping lists to performing advanced data analysis and complex calculations.

“We examine the Calc guide from the end user’s perspective—covering step-by-step instructions, explanations of the spreadsheet’s internal workings, and illustrating the use cases where each feature applies” said Olivier Hallot, Documentation Coordinator and Guide Lead for Calc.

(more…)

Document Freedom Day: because the format is the message

 

Every year, on the last Wednesday in March, the open-source community celebrates Document Freedom Day. It’s an excellent opportunity to pause for a moment and ask a question that seems technical but is actually deeply political: who controls your documents?

The answer depends almost entirely on the file formats you use.

A freedom that is easy to overlook

When you write a letter, draft a report or create a spreadsheet, you are producing something that belongs to you: your words, your data, your work. But if that content is locked into a proprietary format, whose specifications are controlled by a single vendor, subject to change without notice and readable only by software that vendor chooses to certify, then your ownership is, at best, conditional.

Open document standards exist to remove this restriction. Open Document Format (ODF), the ISO standard adopted by LibreOffice and the wider free software ecosystem, ensures that your documents remain yours: today, tomorrow and twenty years from now, regardless of the software vendor or subscription model.

This is no minor convenience. It is a structural guarantee of autonomy.

The political dimension

Document Freedom Day is not just a celebration for developers and system administrators. It is a reminder that the documents underpinning the infrastructure of public communication, and their format, carry political weight.

When a public authority sends a document in a format that requires proprietary software to open correctly, it is making a biased technical choice, and is implicitly imposing the use of a specific vendor’s product at the citizen’s expense. When a school requires all pupils to submit assignments in a format tied to proprietary software, it is normalising dependence from a very young age.

Open standards break this chain of dependency, and transform the document – and the information it contains – into a shared resource that no single actor can control.

A step forward to celebrate

This year there is another reason to celebrate: the Deutschland-Stack, which makes ODF and PDF/UA standards mandatory in public administration. And this is not a pilot project or a recommendation, but a binding requirement based on the recognition that digital sovereignty begins with the formats a state uses to carry out its work.

Germany’s move is significant not only in itself, but also as a signal to other European governments that the issue has been resolved. ODF is mature, interoperable and ready for large-scale institutional implementation, so the question is no longer whether open standards work, but how much longer other administrations can justify not using them.

What still needs to be done

Progress is real, but the work is far from finished. Proprietary formats still dominate much of the public sector, education and business environments across all continents. Interoperability remains a daily struggle for users who receive documents that do not display correctly with free software, not because ODF is deficient but because some vendors continue to treat format compatibility as a competitive weapon rather than a public asset.

The FOSS community has a fundamental task: to produce the best possible implementations, document migration paths, support public administrations in the transition, and present the political argument clearly and without excuses. The choice of format is not a preference; it is a political decision with long-term consequences for democratic access to information.

A reason to keep going

Document Freedom Day reminds us all that the infrastructure of a free society must be built on open foundations. The use of LibreOffice in public administration, ODF requirements in procurement policies, and citizens being able to open a government document without having to buy a proprietary software licence are not small victories, but the gradual construction of a digital public space that belongs to everyone.

This deserves to be celebrated. And then back to work.

The Document Foundation supports Document Freedom Day and the global campaign for truly open document standards. To find out more, visit The Document Foundation’s website.

The Brazilian law that changes everything for schools, and why LibreOffice is the right answer

Brazil’s Lei 15.211/2025, also known as the Estatuto Digital da Criança e do Adolescente (EDCA), came into force on 17 March 2026. It is one of the world’s most comprehensive digital child protection laws, with profound implications for the Brazilian education system.

School administrators, IT managers, and education policymakers now have a legal obligation to consider every technology product deployed in classrooms. LibreOffice, the FOSS office suite developed and maintained by The Document Foundation, is uniquely positioned to meet these obligations by design.

What the law actually requires

The EDCA establishes that every IT product or service directed at children and adolescents – or “likely to be accessed” by them – must guarantee their integral protection, prioritise their best interests and maintain the highest level of privacy and data security (Art. 3). Among the law’s key requirements are:

  • Privacy by default and by design. Products must operate at the highest available level of data protection as a default setting, and any reduction in protection must require explicit, informed consent (Art. 7).
  • No behavioural profiling. Any form of automated or manual profiling of minors based on behaviour, preferences, economic status or location is subject to strict limitations (Arts. 2(V) and 26).
  • No predatory commercial exploitation. Techniques that profile children for advertising purposes are explicitly prohibited, as are design patterns intended to encourage prolonged use (Arts. 22, 17).
  • Digital citizenship education. The promotion of the safe, responsible and critical use of technology is listed as one of the foundational principles for all IT products used by minors (Art. 4, VIII).
  • Transparency and accountability: Technology providers must be auditable and have a legal representative in Brazil, as well as publishing transparency reports (Arts. 31 and 40).

Educational software is not exempt from this law. Any office suite, productivity tool or learning application running on school devices is an IT product as defined in Art. 1, and the access standard is deliberately broad.

Why LibreOffice fits natively

LibreOffice was not designed to exploit the attention of its users. It is not a cloud service. It does not collect usage telemetry by default. It does not profile users. It does not display adverts. There are no engagement algorithms optimised to keep students on the platform.

In the language of the EDCA, it is a product whose architecture embodies the principle of privacy by design (Art. 7), and not because it has been retrofitted to comply, but because there is no commercial incentive for it to do otherwise.

Specifically:

No data leaves the classroom without explicit configuration. LibreOffice runs locally on the desktop, and documents are stored wherever the school chooses. There is no background synchronisation with a vendor’s cloud and no automatic transmission of usage patterns to a third party. It is the school, and not a foreign corporation, that controls the data environment.

It is auditable to the source code. According to the EDCA, technology products must be evaluated for their potential impact on the health and safety of children and adolescents (Art. 8, I). LibreOffice’s source code is publicly available under the Mozilla Public Licence, and can be inspected by any school, researcher or public authority. There is no black box.

There are no manipulative design patterns. The law explicitly prohibits features that artificially extend or sustain product use by minors, such as autoplay, reward programs, non-essential notifications and personalised recommendation systems (Art. 17, §4). LibreOffice has none of these features. It opens a document, it helps the user to work with it, and then it closes. This is what neutral, instrumentally focused software looks like.

It supports digital citizenship education. Art. Article 4, Section VIII of the EDCA establishes the promotion of “digital citizenship and critical thinking for safe and responsible technology use” as a foundational principle. Using LibreOffice in schools is a pedagogical act in itself as it teaches students that software is a tool and not a service that monitors them; that their documents belong to them and are stored in open standard formats (ODF), which any compatible application can read; and that technology infrastructure can be based on transparency rather than restriction.

Open Document Format is digital sovereignty. ODF, LibreOffice’s native format, is an ISO-certified open standard. Documents created by Brazilian students today will be readable ten years from now by any application that respects the standard without requiring vendor permissions or subscription fees, and data being routed through a foreign corporate infrastructure. This is not an incidental feature but a material expression of the EDCA’s guarantee of meaningful access to digital technologies (Art. 5, §2).

In plain terms, schools deploying LibreOffice do not need to read a 200-page data processing agreement to understand what happens to their students’ data. They do not need to complete a vendor questionnaire and wait for a legal team in the US to respond, or to negotiate a contractual carve-out for LGPD (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados) compliance, or worry about whether a new product feature silently changes the default privacy configuration.

The architecture answers the question. Local software, open code, no telemetry, no profiling and no engagement design are not compliance claims that need to be verified. They are structural properties that can be confirmed by any competent system administrator.
Under the EDCA, transparency is not optional. It is what the law demands.

A Call to Action for Brazilian Education

The EDCA came into force on 17 March 2026. Schools and municipalities that have not yet reviewed their technology stack now have a legal obligation, rather than just a policy recommendation, to do so. The Document Foundation invites Brazilian educators, school administrators and public procurement officers to:

  1. Audit existing deployments of proprietary cloud platforms against the EDCA’s requirements for privacy by default, data minimisation and prohibition of behavioural profiling.
  2. Evaluate LibreOffice as a classroom productivity solution, including the enterprise-ready LibreOffice Technology ecosystem for schools requiring centralised administration and support.
  3. Adopt the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as the institutional open standard for document formats to ensure that student work remains portable, open and free from vendor dependency.
  4. Engage with the community. LibreOffice is developed by a global community of active contributors, including many in Latin America. Brazilian schools that adopt LibreOffice are not just consumers, but they can help to shape the tool that their students use.

The Lei da Criança e do Adolescente is a law that protects children in digital environments, and LibreOffice is a software that was never designed to exploit children. This is not a coincidence, but the consequence of a shared understanding of what technology should be in a democratic society: a tool for users, not the other way around.

The Document Foundation is the non-profit organisation behind LibreOffice. LibreOffice is free to download, deploy and use. For information on enterprise deployments and certified support providers, visit https://www.libreoffice.org or write to info@documentfoundation.org.

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