LibreOffice 7.0 is being developed by our worldwide community, and is due to be released in early August 2020 – see the release notes describing the new features here. Of course, there’s still a lot more development to come, so more features will be added to that page in the coming months!
In order to find, report and triage bugs, the LibreOffice QA team is organizing the first Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 7.0 on Monday May 11, 2020. Tests will be performed on the first Alpha version, which will be available on the pre-releases server a few days before the event. Builds will be available for Linux (DEB and RPM), macOS and Windows, and can be installed and run in parallel along with the production version.
Mentors will be available from 07:00 UTC to 19:00 UTC for questions or help in the IRC channel #libreoffice-qa and the Telegram QA Channel. Of course, hunting bugs will be possible also on other days, as the builds of this particular Alpha release (LibreOffice 7.0.0 Alpha1) will be available until end of May. Check the Release Plan.
During the day there will be a dedicated session to test the ongoing work in the SKIA Graphics Engine integration from 14:00 and 16:00 UTC.
All details of the first bug hunting session are available on the wiki. LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!
(Note: this is a section from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2019, which will be published in full in the coming weeks.)
In 2019, LibreOffice celebrated its ninth birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well.
Throughout the year, several Bug Hunting Sessions were held in preparation for the new major releases. These typically took place on a single day between set times, so that experienced developers and QA engineers could help new volunteers to file and triage bugs via the IRC channels and mailing lists. The Bug Hunting Sessions for LibreOffice 6.3 were held on May 9 and July 8 – while those for LibreOffice 6.4 took place on October 15 and December 18.
LibreOffice 6.2
On February 7, LibreOffice 6.2 was officially released after six months of development. It was the first version to showcase the new (but optional) NotebookBar user interface as a non-experimental feature, making it available for all users. The NotebookBar is available in Tabbed, Grouped and Contextual flavors, each one with a different approach to the menu layout, and complements the traditional Toolbars and Sidebar. The Tabbed variant aims to provide a familiar interface for users coming from proprietary office suites and is supposed to be used primarily without the sidebar, while the Grouped one allows to access “first-level” functions with one click and “second-level” functions with a maximum of two clicks.
LibreOffice 6.2 also included tidied-up context menus, performance improvements for change tracking, multivariate regression analysis in Calc, and many extra features in LibreOffice Online. A video was produced to explain and demonstrate many of the new features in LibreOffice 6.2. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release. Here it is:
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LibreOffice 6.3
Later in the year, on August 8, LibreOffice 6.3 was made available. Writer and Calc performance was improved by an order of magnitude based on documents provided by end users: text files with different bookmarks, tables and embedded fonts, large ODS/XLSX spreadsheets, and Calc files with VLOOKUP load and render more quickly. Saving Calc spreadsheets as XLS files was also made faster.
Meanwhile, the Tabbed Compact version of the NotebookBar user interface, introduced in LibreOffice 6.2, was made available for Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw. It leaves more space for user documents, spreadsheets and presentations on laptops with wide screens. In addition, the new Contextual Single UI was ready for Writer and Draw.
Export as PDF was improved with the support for the standard PDF/A-2 document format, which is required by several organizations for long term file storage. In addition, the design of editable PDF forms was simplified with the addition of the Form menu to Writer.
Finally, a redaction feature was added to remove or hide sensitive information such as personal data before exporting or sharing the file, to help companies or organisations to comply with regulations. As with the previous release, a video was created to demonstrate the new features:
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Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global programme focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. LibreOffice took part last year, which led to some great new features including a QR code generator and NotebookBar improvements.
And in 2020, we’re in GSoC again! Six projects have been selected, which are due to be implemented over the summer:
LibreOffice’s native file format is OpenDocument, a fully open and standardised format that’s great for sharing documents and long-term data storage. Of course, LibreOffice does its best to open files made by other office software as well, even if they’re stored in pseudo-“standards” with cryptic and obfuscated contents. Compatibility with PowerPoint PPT(X) presentations is therefore a challenge, but developers are working hard on improvements…
Everyone is invited to participate in the PowerPoint support initiative, either in development or testing. If you are interested in joining, please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org.
Macros help users to automate common tasks in LibreOffice. In September 2019 we announced a new team in our community to work on macro support. A progress report was published in November 2019, so let’s review everything that happened since then.
If you are interested in contributing to the macro team (development, testing or documentation), we’d love to hear from you – please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org and we’ll get in touch.
Wiki docs
Thanks to Nathan Ullberg, many wiki articles previously only available in French can now be read in English as well. Nathan also updated existing articles and created an article about manipulating LineShape objects in Impress. Detailed lists of his work can be found on his wiki user page.
Thanks to everyone who worked on these tasks! Everyone is welcome to join our community and get involved – just email ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org and we’ll get back to you.
LibreOffice is made by volunteers and certified developers across the globe, and today we’re announcing a new system to credit their work and show appreciation: Open Badges. So what are they?
In a nutshell, Open Badges are PNG images that are awarded to contributors for reaching a certain threshold – such as a number of commits to the codebase, or answering questions on Ask LibreOffice. But these images are something special: they contain metadata describing the contributor’s work, which can be verified using an external service. Open Badges are used by other free software projects, such as Fedora.
We at The Document Foundation – the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice – will start issuing customised badges to contributors, who can then proudly display them on websites or social media. And because of the embedded metadata, contributors can use the badges as proof of their work. If you’ve been a long-time contributor to LibreOffice and are in the job market, use your badge to highlight your involvement in a large open source project!
Starting off: Ask LibreOffice contributors
The first set of badges go to the nine people on Ask LibreOffice, our community assistance website, who’ve posted over 100 answers. We’ll be in touch personally with the badges! Their usernames:
Ratslinger
ajlittoz
Mike Kaganski
Opaque
Lupp
erAck
RGB-es
ebot
JohnSUN
Stay tuned to this blog for more Open Badges awards!
