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Coming up: the Month of LibreOffice, May 2018!

Joining an open source project is awesome, for many reasons. You get to:

  • Talk to, meet and share ideas with people around the world
  • Build up valuable skills that could be useful in a future career
  • Make the world a better place, by improving software for everyone to use

In the case of LibreOffice, you can join us at our yearly conference too! Here’s our community posing for a photo in Brno, Czech Republic:

LibreOffice Conference 2016

In May, we’ll be celebrating contributions all across the project with a “Month of LibreOffice”. Everyone who helps out with development, design, documentation, QA, marketing, translations and user support will get a big “thank you” from us, and a nifty sticker pack in the post:

(Oh, and there’s an extra special surprise as well, but more on that later!) We’ll post full details on May 1st, but in the meantime, you can find out more about joining the project on our Get Involved page. You don’t have to be a software developer – you can help out in many other areas as well. See you soon!

Document Freedom Day 2018 in Cuba

The Document Foundation has supported the Cuban LibreOffice community, represented by Carlos Parra Zaldivar, for the Document Freedom Day 2018 in Holguín, on the opening day of the International Book Exhibition in the local library Biblioteca Provincial “Alex Urquiola”. LibreOffice is included in the Cuban GNU/Linux distribution Nova, and as such is part of the IT syllabus in all schools.

Below, some pictures shot during the event of Carlos Parra Zaldivar speaking about LibreOffice and ODF (Open Document Format) and some of the promotional materials produced by the Cuban LibreOffice community.

LibreOffice contributor interview: Edmund Laugasson

Edmund Laugasson

LibreOffice is being used in governments and companies around the world, and this is largely thanks to support and advocacy from local communities and developers. Today we’re talking to Edmund Laugasson, a member of the Estonian LibreOffice community, who is promoting the software and the Open Document Format (ODF) in his country…

How popular is Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and LibreOffice in Estonia?

To be honest, it has not yet been deeply investigated, but the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications has published a “State Information System Interoperability Framework” (in Estonian) where clearly ODF is the main format suggested to use. The status of OOXML is only “allowed”. OOXML should not be confused with the file formats used by MS Office, which differs from OOXML by several proprietary changes. Even LibreOffice offers two different versions to save, e.g. docx – one is OOXML and the another one is used in MS Word. The same applies also to rest of OOXML, MS Office formats that coexist in LibreOffice. As the status of ODF is “suggested”, it is not mandatory. Despite that, ODF is quite widely used – for instance, educational institutions usually have LibreOffice installed, along with some local authorities.

Research is quite challenging as people usually do not respond to questionnaires, and researchers need to meet people directly in order to get reliable answers to questions.

What is your background and involvement in FLOSS?

I live in a small city called Rapla in Estonia, but I work as a lecturer at IT College, which is part of the Tallinn University of Technology. I am involved in FLOSS in many ways. When teaching, I use FLOSS as much as possible: the operating system in university is Ubuntu Linux, and I use derivates like Linux Mint MATE, all 64-bit and the latest LTS (Long Term Support) versions. The office suite is LibreOffice everywhere under GNU/Linux but under MS Windows next to MS Office. It is very important to have LibreOffice installed on every operating system that is used. Also, at least ODF file formats should be opened by LibreOffice by default. Then it would be much easier to deploy ODF in future when the ground is prepared properly. We have a dual-boot system (Microsoft Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux 16.04.4), and in one classroom also a triple-boot (with macOS 10.12).

In addition I am involved as a board member of the Estonian Free and Open-Source Software Association, taking care of FLOSS in general in Estonia. Also I am involved in the Network of Estonian Teachers of Informatics and Computer Science (NETICS) as a board member. There I promote FLOSS – LibreOffice in particular – to encourage people to use it.
The next involvement is my doctoral studies at Tallinn University, where the current topic is “Technology approval as a factor of adopting a free software ecosystem”.

Further activities will come when I graduate and can focus more on wider deployments of FLOSS, particularly LibreOffice. I have serious plans to arrange all this, but as people in Estonia are not very cooperative, it takes more time – regardless of the fact that Estonia is small. Lots of people just do not believe in better future full of FLOSS, and those few who still believe, will act towards that goal. So to anyone who feels the FLOSS spark inside: do not hesitate to contact me.

What do you think are the biggest obstacles to wider FLOSS and LibreOffice adoption in Estonia?

My first paper in 2013 (published at the IFIP conference) showed that awareness of FLOSS is still relatively low, but interest in getting more information is quite high. Microsoft is doing relatively strong lobbying work, also in Estonia, and the government has quite weak power regarding FLOSS. There is also sometimes controversial behaviour: five state-arranged procurements in the FLOSS field (four state procurements relating to LibreOffice, one state procurement to create an interoperability framework), but weak activities around FLOSS in general. So I decided to start my doctoral studies to fix this situation in a scientific (weighted) way.

Thanks to Edmund for his time and effort helping the FLOSS cause. Click here to see many more interviews from LibreOffice contributors – and why not become one yourself! Build up skills, join a friendly community, and help to make LibreOffice better for everyone.

Report of LibreOffice Conference Indonesia

I have attended LibreOffice Conference Indonesia on Saturday, March 25, and Sunday, March 26. The event, hosted by Politeknik Elektronika Negeri Surabaya (PENS), has been the first of its kind in South East Asia, and I hope it will be followed by many similar events in other countries in the region. Of course, the concept of local LibreOffice Conferences in Asia has been launched by the Japanese community, which is a leading example of commitment.

The day before the conference the Indonesia LibreOffice community has organized a localization workshop, led by Andika Triwidada, a long time contributor which has coordinated the Indonesia localization since almost forever.

The day after the conference we have visited the outskirts of Surabaya, with magnificent memories of the past. We have also visited the famous Sampoerna cigarette factory in Surabaya.

On Tuesday, in the morning we have had a meeting with a group of PENS’ IT professors, led by the university dean, with whom we have discussed the opportunity of increasing the presence of open source software in their syllabus. In addition, the university is going to evaluate the migration to open source software and LibreOffice, including the migration to ODF as a way to overcome vendor’s lock-in.

In the afternoon, Frankling Weng and me have keynoted in front of a large student audience about getting involved in open source, and have been followed by Ahmad Haris – the amazing conference coordinator – with a workshop in Indonesian on open source software. Haris has already provided a report in English about the conference, where he offers several insights on the organization. In addition, pictures of the entire event are available on Flickr.

The conference has been a fantastic learning opportunity for me, especially in terms of better understanding local communities in Asia. Last year, I started my full immersion in this topic when I visited Taiwan to attend COSCUP and meet the local community and the country’s Ministry of Innovation, Audrey Tang. Participating in local community events is very important to strengthen the ties between The Document Foundation core team – Board of Directors, Membership Committee and staff members – and LibreOffice incredible global community.

As I said several times during my talks, I have learned more about the community during the four days spent in Surabaya than in weeks of email and social media interactions. Of course, they are both important, but the human face-to-face relation is still invaluable in terms of relationship building. I hope to be able to attend similar events in the future, in other countries in Asia, South America and Africa.

The crowd at LibreOffice Conference Indonesia
Conference volunteers having fun on stage
LibreOffice t-shirts, backpacks and books
Andika Triwidada with conference team

LibreOffice monthly recap: March 2018

There’s so much going on in the LibreOffice project – in development, documentation, design, QA, translations and much more. So at the end of each month we’ll be posting summaries of recent activities and updates, to help you get an overview of what’s going on. Here’s what happened in March…

  • LibreOffice 5.4.6 was released, with almost 60 bug and regression fixes. This is part of the 5.4 branch, targeted at mainstream users and enterprises. More information in the press release.
  • The Indonesian community organised a three day conference, supported by The Document Foundation. The website has details (in Indonesian), and below is a video promoting the event – English subtitles are available:

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  • Meanwhile, we’re already getting excited about the main LibreOffice Conference due later this year, in Tirana. But we’re looking even further ahead, and announced a call for locations for the LibreOffice Conference 2019. The deadline for sending proposals is June 30, so if you want to help out, let us know!
  • Buovjaga from the QA community wrote a blog post describing the importance of quality assurance in open source projects. “QA is acting like neurotransmitters in the body of the project”, he writes, explaining that QA is involved in many different areas.
  • This year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is fast approaching, and we reached out to potential participants. In recent years, GSoC students have contributed many great features and updates to LibreOffice, so we look forward to seeing what will happen this year.

  • Olivier Hallot from the documentation community wrote about rich content arriving in the new help system. “The new help can now access external videos on YouTube or similar services, and also open or download OpenDocument files to support the textual explanations of LibreOffice features in the help pages.”
  • Also in blog news, Lera Goncharuk summarised migrations to LibreOffice in Russia on his blog. These include migrations at the federal government level, along with regional administrations.
  • Finally, development continues on LibreOffice 6.1, which is due to be released in early August. You can see some of the new features in the release notes, such as the ability to sort images anchored to cells in Calc:

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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

(more…)

Press Releases

Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.4

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

Open Document Format

The philosophy behind ODF: openness, freedom and control

File formats are not usually the subject of philosophical debate because most users just want to open, save and share…