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Show your love for free software using LibreOffice Draw

Free Software Foundation Europe has developed an “I Love Free Software” template for the upcoming Valentine Day, to allow free open source software advocates to express the reason why they love FOSS, and they support it as volunteer contributors, or as simple users. FSFE template was developed using Inkscape, which is an outstanding FOSS application to create and manage vector images, but is also rather difficult to use if your graphics skills are limited. So, I imported the Inkscape SVG template into LibreOffice Draw, and tweaked it a bit by using Liberation Sans and Liberation Sans Narrow fonts – which are installed by LibreOffice and as such are always available to LibreOffice users, and by replacing the lines of text with a text box, to make it easier to write the personal notes and the name. I have also added a text box with instructions on how to fit the user portrait inside the heart shape, which is a rather easy operation with LibreOffice Draw.

Here you are. This is my FOSS Valentine made with LibreOffice Draw (and if you wonder why the font looks different, it is because I replaced Liberation Sans with IBM Plex Condensed, a different FOSS font, as I wanted to fit a longer text into the text box). You can download the LibreOffice Draw template from this link (the file is a Hybrid PDF, so you have to open LibreOffice and then open the file from LibreOffice, as otherwise the file opens as a regular PDF and cannot be edited as a LibreOffice Draw template).

Make better presentations with the Impress Guide 7.0

Do you use LibreOffice Impress? Want to do more with your presentations? Check out the brand new Impress Guide 7.0 update, created by our awesome documentation community:

This 330-page book explores the basics of Impress, before moving on to master slides, styles, templates, graphic objects, effects, exporting in various formats, and much more. Download the PDF version here!

Who made this happen?

Answer: our community! Many thanks to Peter Schofield, Felipe Viggiano, Claire Wood, Regina Henschel, Dave Barton, Jean Hollis Weber, Samantha Hamilton and Olivier Hallot for their work on it.

We asked Peter to summarise his experiences as he updated the text:

I am experienced with LibreOffice in creating documents. Also, I have had over 30 years of experience as a Technical Writer in many fields of engineering, construction, electronics and software. However, I am not experienced in creating presentations, so writing the user guide was an experience and I now know more about creating presentations.

Did I enjoy it? Yes, because I enjoy having a challenge when writing instructions. Also, it gave me the opportunity to write the guide from the perspective of a novice in using presentation software. I do find that in some of the other LibreOffice guides, taking the novice view has been forgotten.

And what about newcomers to the documentation project – how can they get started? Peter adds:

The main tip for all contributors to LibreOffice is to write a software user guide assuming that a novice will be using the guide to help them become more experienced in using the software. Make it easier for users to understand, which will in turn make LibreOffice more popular as it gets recommended.

Write a user guide in a Simplified English, so that it becomes easier to translate and easier for non-English speakers to use an English-language user guide. Simplified English is used in the aviation industry and is a good standard to adopt for the LibreOffice team, but needs very tight control to be successful.

Thanks again to Peter and everyone else in the documentation team for the update. And everyone is welcome to give them a hand – it’s a great way to contribute back to LibreOffice, understand the software better, and build up skills for potential career options in technical writing!

LibreOffice monthly recap: January 2021

Two days ago we announced the release of LibreOffice 7.1, but a lot happened in the project in January too! Let’s check it out…

  • And that wasn’t the only big update in the docs project. The Brazilian Portuguese community announced the translation of the Calc Guide 7.0. This is a detailed handbook covering all aspects of the spreadsheet component of LibreOffice.

  • On the lookout for a career change? The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, is looking for a Development Mentor. This is a remote position, 20 – 40 hours per week, focused on bringing new contributors into LibreOffice project. The deadline for applications is February 18, so if you’re interested, apply ASAP!

  • Ever reported a bug in LibreOffice? Wondered who handles it, and how it gets resolved? Well, check out this story of a round-the-world trip to fix a bug. A glitch was spotted in the LibreOffice Help content, and community members in Brazil, Russia and Mexico came together to fix it – a truly international effort 😊

  • Later in the month, Jean-Pierre Ledure wrote about his ScriptForge project, an extensible and robust collection of macro scripting resources for LibreOffice to be invoked from user Basic macros. If you regularly use macros in LibreOffice, check it out!

  • Finally, we wrapped up January by announcing the LibreOffice New Generation project. This aims to tbring new – and especially younger – people into the LibreOffice community, so that they can build up their skills and contribute in many areas (coding, design, marketing, localisation, QA and more). Join us and let us know your ideas…

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Mastodon. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help to make LibreOffice even better for everyone!

Google Seasons of Doc 2020: Extensive Calc Functions Description is there.

The Calc Guide for LibreOffice release 6.2 contained a lengthy appendix (70 pages) devoted to the 500+ functions available in Calc, providing a shallow list of the functions and their arguments. During the update of the document for release 6.4 in 2019, the Documentation Team agreed that it would be better to move this list to an online service, and as part of this move, to enhance the function descriptions by adding more examples, use cases and collateral information on standards, compatibility and more.

That situation provided an opportunity for us to create a documentation project to submit to Google Season of Documents 2020 (https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs), an initiative by Google to create, enhance and extend the documentation of open source projects worldwide such as LibreOffice.

The Document Foundation applied to the program on behalf of the LibreOffice Community and submitted several ideas for documentation, which included the Extensive Calc Functions Wiki pages. The Foundation received several applications, containing important information including the technical writer’s resumés, proposals for project schedule and suggested deliverables. After a careful evaluation by the project mentors, the Foundation retained the application of Ronnie Gandhi (@Krezhairo) a computer science undergraduate student enrolled at IIT Roorkee, India.

The project was targeted for three months work and ended in early December 2020. Steve Fanning, who had already worked as coordinator of the Calc Guide, served as mentor with Olivier Hallot as second mentor. Ilmari Lauhakangas and Olivier managed the administrative aspects of the project on behalf of The Document Foundation.

Monitoring the project was an important part of the task. There was frequent correspondence on the Documentation Team’s mailing list to discuss the detailed technical aspects of the work. In addition, Ronnie, Steve and Olivier met online once each week for follow-up discussions and resolution of any issues. To maximize the benefit of the opportunity provided by Google, it was decided to improve the wiki page contents with

  • Statements describing each function’s compliance with the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.2 specification
  • Extra use cases and examples
  • Illustrations when applicable
  • External references for further reading
  • Identification of equivalent functions in other spreadsheet software

A useful side-effect of the project was the identification of several potential areas of improvement for Calc’s help files and the exposure of a software issue in two rarely used functions! In addition, Ronnie was able to present his work at the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference in October 2020 and hopefully gained some insights into the role of a Technical Writer.

We are grateful for the work that Ronnie was able to carry out during this task. As all documentation related to software development, the Extensive Calc Functions Wiki is open for further improvements. If you would be interested in helping, please get it touch through the Documentation Team’s mailing list.

Access the Extensive Calc Functions Description in the Document Foundation wiki at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Calc_Functions.

Happy documenting!

Announcing LibreOffice New Generation

Today we’re announcing a new project: LibreOffice New Generation. This isn’t about the software, but about the people behind it. As you probably know, LibreOffice is made by a worldwide community of certified developers and volunteers, working on the source code, translations, documentation, design, QA, marketing, infrastructure and other areas.

Well, we want to reach out to even more people, so read on to find out more…

What is this?

LibreOffice New Generation is our project to bring new – and especially younger – people into the LibreOffice community. While we’re proud that our community is diverse and has people from all ages, younger people help to bring fresh ideas and approaches to the project. So we want to make it easier for everyone to join, get involved and have fun – regardless of age.

Who can join?

Anyone! If you’re a school or university student and use LibreOffice, we’d love to hear from you. What do you use LibreOffice for? How can it be improved? Can we help you to spread the word? Join us and let’s work together to make LibreOffice even better!

But everyone else is welcome to join too. The Document Foundation is a small non-profit, so we’d appreciate all help with bringing younger contributors into the project and helping them to get involved with our teams.

What will you do?

Many students who contribute to free and open source software projects like to have something which confirms their work. At TDF we’ve been issuing Open Badges for community contributions – these are special badges with metadata inside, showing what someone did. So we’d like to start issuing these to younger and newer community members too.

We have other ideas and projects, but we’d like to hear from you about your experiences! What else can we offer? How can we credit and reward contributors for their work? Let us know what you think…

How can I join?

If you’d like to discuss ways to get more younger people involved in the LibreOffice community, join our Telegram group where we can discuss Open Badges and other ideas for LibreOffice New Generation. (For all other discussions and suggestions for LibreOffice, please see the general group.) If you’d like to suggest something directly, email me (Mike) and we’ll have a chat.

We look forward to meeting you, and hearing your ideas and experiences!

The round-the-world trip to fix a bug

A little story: The beauty of planet-wide collaborative work in LibreOffice

Mrs. Vera Cavalcante (@veracape), from Brazil, a long-time contributor for the Portuguese documentation on LibreOffice, was reviewing the translation of the Calc Guide and double-checking the translated text, with respect to the current user interface and the Help pages. Vera noticed that the Help pages on conditional formatting were not correct any more, and reported in the Brazilian team Telegram group (Bugzilla is still very hard for non-native English speakers).

The message hit Olivier Hallot (@ohallot) from the LibreOffice documentation coordination team (and Brazilian community member), who reported the bug in LibreOffice’s Bugzilla, for later fixing. LibreOffice’s outstanding quality depends on good quality and numerous errors reports to be submitted properly, for improvements and fixing defects. There is no point leaving a bug unreported.

The topic was of special interest of Roman Kuznetsov (@kompilainenn) from Russia, who already wrote documentation about conditional formatting. Roman wrote the fix, and submitted a patch in Gerrit (the service that controls the code corrections in LibreOffice)…

…and Adolfo Jayme Barrientos (@fitojb) from Mexico reviewed and approved the patch for merging in the main Help code.

End result: LibreOffice’s Help page fixed!

Press Releases

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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…

Open Document Format

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