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Announcing the LibreOffice US community!

LibreOffice US community banner

LibreOffice is made by hundreds of people around the world. In many countries, we have active communities that organise events, do local marketing, and help users in their local language.

But while we have many users and contributors in the United States of America, so far we haven’t built up an active local community. Of course, part of this is due to the size of the country – the US is huge, so getting people together isn’t easy.

Nonetheless, we want to try! There are many things we’d like to do in the US with LibreOffice, such as:

  • Creating merchandise designs for events and giveaways
  • Working on local marketing materials and advocacy projects
  • Organising meetups to bring contributors and users together

To get things going, we’ve created some communication groups and a social media channel. Our Discord server has a few channels which are also bridged to Matrix, so join one of those and let’s start discussing ideas. We also have the LibreOfficeUS Mastodon account where we’ll be posting updates.

We look forward to seeing you there 😊

Month of LibreOffice, November 2025 – Half-way point!

Month of LibreOffice banner

We’re just over half-way through the Month of LibreOffice, November 2025. And already, 219 contributors have won cool LibreOffice sticker packs! Details on how to claim them will be provided at the end of the month, but if you don’t see your name (or username) on that page, it’s not too late to join…

How to take part

There are many ways you can help out – and you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a:

  • Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers.
  • First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: Go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 11 and LibreOffice 25.8.3”.
  • Drum Beater, spreading the word: Tell everyone about LibreOffice on Mastodon, Bluesky or X (Twitter)! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.
  • Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

So, two more weeks to go! We’ll be posting more updates on this blog and our Mastodon, Bluesky and X (Twitter) accounts…

Do something awesome! Join the Month of LibreOffice, November 2025

Month of LibreOffice banner, showing community members at events

Love LibreOffice? Join the project and help to make it even better – get involved in the Month of LibreOffice, November 2025! Over the next four weeks, hundreds of people around the world will collaborate to improve the software – and you can help them. There are many ways to get involved, as you’ll see in a second.

And best of all: everyone who contributes to LibreOffice in November can claim a cool sticker pack, and has the chance to win extra LibreOffice merchandise such as mugs, hoodies, T-shirts, rucksacks and more (we’ll choose 10 participants at random at the end):

How to take part

There are many ways you can help out – and you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…

  • Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers. We also monitor the users@ mailing list.
  • First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: Go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 11 and LibreOffice 25.8.2”.
  • Drum Beater, spreading the word: Tell everyone about LibreOffice on Mastodon, Bluesky or X (Twitter)! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.
  • Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

We’ll be updating this page every few days with usernames across our various services, as people contribute. So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker pack at the end as thanks from us! And who knows, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to win bonus merch as well…

So let’s get going! We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon, Bluesky and X (Twitter) accounts over the next four weeks – stay tuned…

LibreOffice project and community recap: October 2025

Latin American LibreOffice Conference 2025

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

  • We started the month by posting the LibreOffice Podcast, Episode #5 –Accessibility in Free and Open Source Software, with Michael Weghorn and Mike Saunders. Watch it below – or on PeerTube.

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  • Markdown support is coming to LibreOffice! This is just one of the projects from the Google Summer of Code 2025, and should be included in our next major release, LibreOffice 26.2, due in February next year.

Screenshot of raw Markdown and import into LibreOffice

  • In October, we had two updates to the software: LibreOffice 25.8.2, and LibreOffice 25.2.7. The latter is the final update to the 25.2 branch, so after this, all users are recommended to upgrade to the 25.8 branch.

LibreOffice 25.8 banner

  • It’s the End of 10! Yes, in October, Microsoft ended official support for Windows 10. This leaves users who want to continue using the operating system with few alternatives — especially if they have an old PC that is not compatible with Windows 11’s demanding hardware requirements — other than buying a new PC. But we a posted about 10 reasons to switch to Linux – and, of course, many desktop Linux distributions ship with LibreOffice.

End of 10 logo

  • Lots of people ask us about LibreOffice’s compatibility with Microsoft Office/365 documents. We think our compatibility is very good (and always improving, as more people send us documents to test), but the format is extremely difficult to work with, as our posts about the DOCX and PPTX formats explain. (Of course, ideally we’d all be using the Open Document Format, regardless of the software we prefer! And here’s how to make your ODF documents more accessible.)

ODF logo

TDF team

Photo of a CPU

Photo of community members in Nepal

  • Meanwhile, the Libreitalia Conference 2025 was organized by Marco Marega – a LibreItalia and TDF Member – in Gradisca d’Isonzo, near the border with Slovenia.

Libreitalia Conference 2025 group photo

  • And our final event report was from LinuxDays 2025 in Prague, where we had a stand with stickers, flyers and a quiz about LibreOffice.

LibreOffice stand at LinuxDays

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

LibreOffice at LinuxDays 2025 in Prague

LibreOffice stand at LinuxDays 2025

On October 4 and 5, the LinuxDays 2025 event took place at the Faculty of Information Technology (Czech Technical University). It combined stands for free and open source software projects with workshops and talks, and the LibreOffice community was there, represented by Zdeněk Crhonek, Petr Valach, Stanislav Horáček and Mike Saunders.

At the stand, we had flyers explaining what LibreOffice is and how it can be used in various contexts (homes, businesses etc.) along with stickers, beer/coffee mats, and printed versions of the handbooks, to show how extensive the documentation for LibreOffice really is. We also had a fun quiz for participants to try.

LibreOffice stand at LinuxDays 2025

During the two days, many visitors came to our stand, gave feedback and asked questions. Of course, at an event focused on Linux, most visitors already knew what LibreOffice is (and many used it regularly). But they gave us some useful feedback and asked about new features, including:

  • Where is the online version of LibreOffice?
  • Better clipboard management (normally handled by the operating system)
  • More development of Base (TDF has a new paid developer role for this)
  • Better options for copying and pasting in Calc
  • Real-time collaboration would be good
  • Clearer warnings about formatting problems when opening Microsoft Office documents
  • Simplify the user interface, using OBS as an example
  • Integrate text translator directly into Writer and Calc
  • It would be nice to have an optional automatic cloud saving feature
  • Make the tabbed user interface default
  • Functions in Calc for interpolating and extrapolating values in 2D and 3D tables

Anyone who wants these features or improvements in LibreOffice is welcome to join our project and help to make it happen, or fund a developer. And we plan to be at more events in the coming months – stay tuned to this blog and our Mastodon account for news!

LibreOffice stand at LinuxDays 2025

LibreItalia Conference 2025 in Gradisca d’Isonzo

Libreitalia Conference 2025 was organized by Marco Marega – a LibreItalia and TDF Member – in Gradisca d’Isonzo, near the border with Slovenia, in Gorizia’s province. Gradisca is a very nice fortified city surrounded be beautiful parks. The conference venue was the historical Monte di Pietà palace, that the municipality administration kindly allowed to use.

Gorizia, the administrative center, is a city divided in two parts, half in Italy (Gorizia itself), and half in Slovenia (Nova Gorica). Together, they are the 2025 European’s Capital of Culture.

The conference was very interesting, with members coming from many different cities. Furio Honsell – a councilman of Friuli Venezia Giulia region and also a former mayor of the city of Udine and rector of Udine University – was the special guest, introducing his regional law proposal to promote free software adoption in local administrations.

Italo Vignoli had two talks, one about the end of Windows 10 support and the other about the 20th anniversary of the ODF format. Marco Gaiarin had a brief talk about good practices for free software adoption. Giulia Bimbi spoke about Italian laws regulating free software adoption in public administrations.

Blerta Mecani and Moreno Cervesato of PNLUG, Pordenone Linux Users’ group, talked about their activities, with a special focus on their project leveraging Italian rules which permit to legally recover used PCs, install Linux on them and then donate them to schools.

Sonia Zorba and Andrej Sossi presented Trieste Linux Users group activities, and their game to learn command line.

Marco Marega opened the day introducing free software and LibreOffice to newbies.
In the afternoon, he explained – together with Gabriele Ponzo – how to contribute to the LibreOffice project, focusing on the tools used to localize the software’s UI and the documentation.

Marco did a very good job in organizing the event, and was very happy to see many community members meeting in his hometown. The conference was a great occasion to strengthen our community.

On November 22/23, some of the conference attendees will meet again in Pordenone, another administrative center of Friuli Venezia Giulia, at the Linux Arena within the Radioamatore2 fair.

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