Category: Foundation

In 2024, LibreOffice celebrated its fourteenth birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

LibreOffice 24.2

On January 31, LibreOffice 24.2 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at The Document Foundation, Collabora, allotropia, CIB, Red Hat, NISZ and other companies and organisations – along with volunteers – worked on many new features.

For instance, there were many improvements to the tabbed “NotebookBar” user interface, while styles support was added for comments. A new search field was added to the Functions sidebar deck in Calc, while in terms of accessibility, several significant improvements to the handling of mouse positions and the presentation of dialogue boxes via the Accessibility APIs were made, allowing screen readers to present them correctly. And regarding security, the “Sace with Password” dialogue box now has a password strength meter, which uses zxcvbn-c to determine the password strength.

TDF’s marketing and localisation community produced and translated a video (below) which demonstrated many of the new features in LibreOffice 24.2. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release. The video is also available on PeerTube.

LibreOffice 24.8

Later in the year, on August 22, TDF released LibreOffice 24.8. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provided a large number of interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats.

In terms of features, this release added many improvements to the Navigator in Writer, including ding cross-references by drag-and-drop items, deleting footnotes and endnotes, and indicating images with broken links. In Calc, the functions FILTER, LET, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, XLOOKUP and XMATCH were added, along with chart types “Pie-of-Pie” and “Bar-of-Pie” which break down a slice of a pie as a pie or bar sub-chart respectively (this also enables import of such charts from OOXML files created with Microsoft Office/365).

Many other features were added as well, and there were a large number of compatibility improvements. As with the previous release, TDF staff worked with the marketing ad localisation communities to make a video (also on PeerTube) to demonstrate some of the new features.

Regular improvements

We also released 14 minor updates with bug and security fixes:

• LibreOffice 7.6.5 – February 22
• LibreOffice 24.2.1 – February 29
• LibreOffice 7.6.6 and 24.2.2 – March 28
• LibreOffice 24.2.3 – May 2
• LibreOffice 7.6.7 – May 10
• LibreOffice 24.2.4 – June 6
• LibreOffice 24.2.5 – July 11
• LibreOffice 24.2.6 – September 5
• LibreOffice 24.8.1 – September 12
• LibreOffice 24.8.2 – September 27
• LibreOffice 24.2.7 – October 31
• LibreOffice 24.8.3 – November 14
• LibreOffice 24.8.4 – December 19

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!

The Document Foundation is the non-profit entity that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community. In 2024 we had with elections for the foundation’s Membership Committee, along with regular Advisory Board calls, and support for other projects and activities

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

Election of new Membership Committee (MC)

The mission of the Membership Committee is to administer membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in the Foundation’s Statutes. Members of the MC are directly elected by community members every two years, and serve for a two-year term. The Board of Directors consists of five members and three deputies.

On July 15, Eliane Domingos – chairperson in the Board of Directors at TDF – announced the election for the next MC, and asked for nominations and self-nominations. On August 27, she then announced that the nomination phase had ended, and that voting would run from 3 – 9 September. Around this time there were also three live “town-hall” Q+A meetings with the candidates, so that community members could ask questions and discuss the responses. We made video recordings from the second and third meetings, and here they are (also available on PeerTube here and here):

On September 12, Eliane announced the preliminary results, along with a “challenge” phase for people to check their votes and contest the results. And on September 27, TDF announced the final results, with full MC members being Gustavo Buzzatti Pacheco, Stéphane Guillou, Balázs Varga, Pranam Kumarbhai Lashkari and Jona Azizaj; and deputy members being Shinji Enoki, Andreas Mantke and Marco Marinello.

TDF would like to say thank you to all past and new members of the MC for their service to the community, and to all candidates for running. Congratulations to the newly elected MC members and their deputies.

Advisory Board members and meetings

The Document Foundation relies on its Advisory Board Members in order to receive advice and support. The Advisory Board’s primary function is to represent The Document Foundation’s supporters and to provide the Board of Directors with advice, guidance and proposals. Current members are Adfinis, allotropia software GmbH, Collabora, GNOME, CAGE Technologies Inc, City of Munich (Landeshaupstadt München), Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA), Software in the Public Interest (SPI), KDE e.V., and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).

Throughout the year, TDF had regular calls with representatives of the Advisory Board. Staff and Board members at TDF provided updates on the foundation, LibreOffice software and community, and described plans and activities for the future. Advisory Board members were invited to provide valuable feedback on TDF’s work, and various ideas and proposals were discussed during the calls. TDF would like to express its thanks to all of the members for their help and support.

New team member

In summer 2024, we welcomed Jonathan Clark to the TDF team as a new developer. Jonathan is initially working on improving LibreOffice’s writing script support, especially for RTL (right-to-left), CTL (complex text layout) and CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) languages. This will help to make LibreOffice more accessible and usable for hundreds of millions of people around the globe.

When asked why he decided to apply for the position at TDF, Jonathan said:

I want to help people use open source software to work and create in their own language. There are other reasons, too: I’m a long-time user, interested in linguistics, and my background seemed like a good fit for the role. But the most important thing to me that I can believe in the mission.

Highlights of activities

Throughout the year, TDF supported – and provided information about – various milestones, campaigns and events, via this blog and our social media channels. For instance, in January we announced the ODF Toolkit 0.12.0 release. Big changes included a new ODF 1.3 mimetype “Text master template”, while the API for Text Selection was completely refactored. In addition, there were many fixes to improve reliability and security.

In early March, we announced that the new Board of Directors at TDF had started its term, while later in the month we celebrated Document Freedom Day, a yearly event which raises awareness of how open standards and open document formats provide us with the freedom to read and write as we wish.

Also in March, we wrote on our blog how the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) had found that the European Commission had breached several provisions of Regulation (EU) 2018/1725, the EU data protection law for EU institutions, in its use of Microsoft 365, including those relating to the transfer of personal data outside the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA). The EDPS is imposing corrective measures on the Commission.

On a related topic, in September we supported a campaign to bring back Free Software funding, asking people to give their feedback to the European Commission, following a cut in important funds for FOSS.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!