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Sunday Marketing #4

Document classification is one of LibreOffice 6.0 improved features. As the concept of classification is not well known outside enterprises and large organizations, to help marketing the feature we have produced this graphic to help community members with presentations. Of course, we have used LibreOffice Draw, and you are invited to localize the ODG file embedded into the attached Hybrid PDF file. The graphic complements the background, which provides additional information about classification.

LibreOffice community focus: Design

LibreOffice’s design community works on the software’s user interface (UI), improving its usability and accessibility. With LibreOffice 6.0 due to be released at the end of the month, we talked to members of the community to get their perspectives on the new version…

What have you been working on in preparation for LibreOffice 6.0?

Various things, including:

  • New table styles and new gradients (click for bigger):

  • The LibreOffice 6.0 motif/splash screen:

  • And menu and toolbar improvements

What are your favourite new features in this release?

Both GSoC (Google Summer of Code) projects are really nice: the revamped customization dialog, and the special character dialog with quick access from the toolbar. In addition, there’s the ability to rotate images to arbitrary degrees, and many other small improvements.

What tools and services do you use in the design community?

At the moment we use Balsamiq Mockups, but next we switch to Pencil. In addition, we use LibreOffice Draw (eg for the new motif) and Inkscape. For communication, we are active on IRC in the #libreoffice-design channel and Telegram.

Finally, how can people get involved with the design community?

A big thanks to the design team for their input and improvements in LibreOffice 6.0. For our final Community Focus, we’ll talk to the development community – more on that soon!

Sunday Marketing #3

Google Trends is a service which compares end user searches for specific terms, and as such is a useful marketing tool to get some insight on the awareness of LibreOffice in comparison with other applications. I have compared the five alternatives to the leading office suite during the last 12 months: LibreOffice is leading, followed – as expected – by OpenOffice and WPS Office. LibreOffice is also leading in term of geographical coverage.

LibreOffice community focus: QA (quality assurance)

With LibreOffice 6.0 due to be released at the end of the month, we’ve been talking to various communities involved in the project. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve chatted with the localisation and documentation teams, and today it’s the turn of QA (quality assurance), which is coordinated by Xisco Fauli…

What has the QA community been working on in preparation for LibreOffice 6.0?

During the development of LibreOffice 6.0, three Bug Hunting Sessions were held (6.0 Alpha1, 6.0 Beta1 and RC1), the last one just two weeks ago. There was also a parallel event organized by Muhammet Kara in Ankara, where volunteers gathered to test LibreOffice 6.0 RC1. Besides that, the QA team is constantly testing the latest daily builds, testing new features, and triaging the bugs reported on Bugzilla.

What are your favourite new features in this release?

That’s a difficult question, especially taking into account all the improvements done in this release to LibreOffice Android Viewer, to LibreOffice Online or the work done by the Google Summer of Code students among others. But if I had to choose one, I think I’d go for the characters dialog refactoring done by Akshay Deep and the UX (user experience) team, as this is probably the feature I will use the most in the near future. Here’s how it looks:

What tools and services do you use in the QA community?

A very handy tool recently completed by Markus Mohrhard is the automated updater for Windows and Linux, which allows the QA team to test daily builds without having to manually download the latest build every time.

This is very practical as testers no longer need to worry about constantly updating to the latest build, and can focus more on testing the program instead, assured that they are testing changes done to the code just the day before.

This tool was presented at the beginning of the LibreOffice 6.0 development cycle, and I believe it will have a very positive impact on the quality of 6.0 as it shortens the time between a problem being introduced in the code, and the time it’s found.

Another tool we’ve been using for some time now is the bibisect repositories, which allow us to find the exact code commit where a bug was introduced, increasing the chances that the bug gets fixed and reducing the time until it gets fixed.

Another tool which is fulling working now is a set of scripts called office-interoperability-tools that we use to automatically find document layout regressions in the master code branch compared to other office suites (in our case we use MS Office). Right now we use it with 8,450 files, and I believe it will also have a positive impact on the quality of LibreOffice 6.0.

Finally, it’s important to mention the main tool used in QA, Bugzilla, the place where all bugs are reported and triaged. Then there’s the wiki page where the QA documentation can be found, and testlink, the application to manage manual tests.

Finally, how can people get involved with the QA community?

The’re many ways one can help LibreOffice QA. Probably the simplest one would be: download the latest pre-release build (LibreOffice 6.0 RC2 as of today), install it and use it as you would use LibreOffice in your daily basis (but take into account it’s still a pre-release, so it’s not recommended to use it with important documents). If you find anything working incorrectly, please report it to Bugzilla.

On the other hand, if you prefer to follow a set of manual tests, you can use testlink (see the documentation for that. We also need help to triage bugs that are not-yet-confirmed, or retest old bugs to see if they might have been fixed.

Lastly, if you’re looking for something especially exciting things to do, you can help us to test daily builds, bisect bugs or write UI-tests. Don’t hesitate to join the #libreoffice-qa channel and say hello. We’ll be grateful to help you with any question or problem you have!

Much gratitude to Xisco and the diligent QA community for helping to make LibreOffice 6.0 a solid release. Their efforts are appreciated by users across the world. Next up, we talk to the design and development communities – more on this blog very soon…

Sunday Marketing #2

In 2017, The Document Foundation has announced the availability of a Dashboard, based on data gathered from several development-related repositories. It is a very useful resource for marketing, as it can be configured to provide either an overview of the project or several detailed charts which can be used to get a more precise picture of what has happened in term of commits, committers, organizations, and issues. The time span covered by the dashboard can be set by the user, from days to years.

The three histograms show trends related to commits, committers and organizations during the last 12 months (clicking on the thumbnails will open a large image, easier to read).

Commits and committers show a rather stable trend, which confirms the maturity of the project. The very few lows in commits are either seasonal or related to the LibreOffice Conference, when core developers are spending most of their time on knowledge sharing rather than on code hacking.

The organizations’ histogram adds the affiliation bit to commits. Collabora, Red Hat and independent volunteer developers (marked as “unknown” in the legend) are the three largest group of contributors, followed by CIB and SIL. Of course, we would like to see more contributions from developers paid by large organizations deploying LibreOffice for personal productivity.

The following four thumbnails show the dashboard home configured for the following time intervals: 2 years, 1 year, 6 months and 90 days. They provide some interesting insights.

Sunday Marketing #1

Starting from today, we launch a weekly blog post focused on marketing topics. We will try to provide ammunition to community members advocating LibreOffice and the Open Document Format, and food for thought to people still trying to understand the viability of FOSS on the desktop.

Let’s start with some numbers about LibreOffice.

Although LibreOffice defect density score – according to Coverity Scan – has been around 0.00 per 1,000 lines of code for ages, we should never forget that it is the outstanding result of the commitment to quality of LibreOffice developers (and we should always mention it with pride when we present the software).

The bulk of the activity related to Coverity Scan weekly reports is under the responsibility of Red Hat developers, but we cannot forget that the result is related to the quality of the entire development process. Of course, LibreOffice – as any other software – is not immune from bugs and regressions, but improvements with every new version have been acknowledged by both enterprise and individual users.

Let’s have a look at development numbers provided by OpenHub. During the last 12 months (2017) there have been 15,389 commits by 244 contributors, and during the last 30 days (December 2017) there have been 1,334 commits by 88 contributors. The chart on the left shows that during the last three years the monthly number of contributors has been rather stable, with highs close to 100 and lows close to 75.

After Coverity Scan and OpenHub, which are independent sources, next week we will analyze an internal tool for the analysis of development-related information: TDF Dashboard.

Press Releases

The Document Foundation Releases LibreOffice 26.2.1 with Contributions from Community and Ecosystem Partners

Videos describing new features available on YouTube and PeerTube Berlin, 26 February 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the…

Open Document Format

IMPORTANT ODF Template added to CRA Guidance feedback

Last week, the European Commission published the draft guidelines for the CRA and opened a comment session open to all…