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Microsoft 365 price hike in Germany? LibreOffice to the rescue!

Microsoft plans to raise the prices of its office software in Germany – and other services – significantly (article in German here). And not just once, but every six months there are to be “price adjustments”.

This is of course a problem for many businesses, organisations, schools and local governments that have limited resources. But it is also a good time to explore alternatives like LibreOffice.

LibreOffice Technology logo

LibreOffice is a free (as in zero cost) office suite, but it also offers fundamental freedoms to study, modify and share the software. Businesses benefit from the software’s data protection and security, and they can also take advantage of professional support. Other advantages:

  • LibreOffice can be installed in parallel with Microsoft Office for testing purposes
  • The German Federal Office for IT security has issued recommendations for secure configuration of LibreOffice
  • In larger environments, LibreOffice can be distributed centrally to users
  • Free software apps strengthen independence from individual providers and reduce vendor lock-in

Writer screenshot

Many companies and organisations have already switched to LibreOffice, so why not take a look?

Learn more and download

LibreOffice project and community recap: March 2023

Montage of images from this post

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

Conference logo

  • Throughout the month, we had three updates to LibreOffice – version 7.5.1 on March 2, and version 7.5.2 on March 30. We’re also maintaining the older LibreOffice 7.4 branch, and released 7.4.6 on March 9.

LibreOffice 7.5 banner

  • LibreOffice installer improvements (on Windows) are coming, thanks to Rachael Odetayo, Ximena Alcaman and Outreachy mentors. We talked to Rachael about what she’s working on, and how the installation process will be simplified.

Rachael Odetayo

  • Data protection and privacy is very important to us – and our users – in the LibreOffice project, so we’re happy to see that the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) is piloting the use of LibreOffice Technology.

LibreOffice Technology stack

Women's Day banner

  • While we’re planning the LibreOffice Conference 2023, as mentioned, we’re also looking further ahead to 2024. If you’d like to host the conference in your location, get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.

Conference 2022 group photo

Czech guidebook cover

  • Members of the German-speaking LibreOffice community met at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage event. They had a booth with merchandise, and answered questions from visitors.

LibreOffice booth at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage

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

German LibreOffice community meeting, March 2023 in Essen

Members sitting at a table

LibreOffice is developed by a worldwide community, and many members of this community live in German-speaking countries. From 24 to 26 March, some of them met at the Linuxhotel in Essen. There was an informal meeting on Friday evening, while the main discussions started on Saturday. The topics included:

  • Further development of the Base database module
  • LibreOffice community at free software events
  • Flyers and donations
  • UX improvement possibilities
  • Status of the German LibreOffice project

Delicious food

It was a nice meeting, even if some couldn’t be there, and hopefully we’ll see each other again at events like FrOSCon – and of course the LibreOffice Conference in Bucharest in September!

Members sitting at a table

LibreOffice 7.5.2 Community available for download

LibreOffice 7.5 banner

Berlin, March 30, 2023 – LibreOffice 7.5.2 Community, the second minor release of the LibreOffice 7.5 line, the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, is available from from our download page for Windows (Intel/AMD and ARM processors), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel processors), and Linux.

Most Significant New Features of the LibreOffice 7.5 Family

GENERAL

  • Major improvements to dark mode support
  • New application and MIME-type icons, more colorful and vibrant
  • The Start Centre can filter documents by type
  • An improved version of the Single Toolbar UI has been implemented
  • PDF Export improved with several fixes, and new options and features
  • Support for font embedding on macOS
  • Improvements to the Font Features dialog with several new options
  • Addition of a zoom slider at the bottom right of the macro editor

WRITER

  • Bookmarks have been significantly improved, and are also much more visible
  • Objects can be marked as decorative, for better accessibility
  • New types added to content controls, which also improve the quality of PDF forms
  • A new automatic accessibility checker option has been added to the Tools menu
  • Initial machine translation is available, based on DeepL translate APIs
  • Several spell checking improvements

CALC

  • Data tables are now supported in charts
  • The Function Wizard now lets you search by descriptions
  • “Spell out” number formats have been added
  • Conditional formatting conditions are now case insensitive
  • Correct behavior when entering numbers with a single prefix quote (‘)

IMPRESS & DRAW

  • New set of default table styles, and creation of table styles
  • Table styles can be customized, saved as master elements and exported
  • Objects can be drag-and-dropped in the navigator
  • It is now possible to crop inserted videos in the slide and still play them
  • The presenter console can also run as a normal window instead of fullscreen

A description of all new features in the LibreOffice 7.5 family is available in the Release Notes.

Screenshot showing tabbed interface

Based on the distinctive features of the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, LibreOffice 7.5 provides a large number of improvements and new features targeted at users sharing documents with Microsoft Office or migrating from Microsoft Office. These users should check new releases of LibreOffice on a regular basis, as the progress is so fast, that each new version improves dramatically over the previous one.

Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), for mobile platforms (Android and iOS), and for the cloud.

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with a large number of dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLA (Service Level Agreements).

Availability of LibreOffice 7.5.2 Community

LibreOffice 7.5.2 Community is available from our download page. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.14. LibreOffice Technology-based products for Android and iOS are listed here.

The Document Foundation does not provide technical support for users, although they can get it from volunteers on user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website. Professional support is also available.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation.

Change log pages: RC1 and RC2

We were at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2023!

LibreOffice booth

In the LibreOffice community, most of our activities take place online: development, design, QA, localisation, marketing and so forth. But we like to meet face-to-face too, at events and conferences – and last weekend we did just that, at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2023 in Germany.

We had a booth with LibreOffice materials (flyers, stickers, pens and books):

Booth materials

As it was a Linux and free software-oriented event, almost all participants already knew about (and used) LibreOffice, but they had lots of interesting questions about our project.

Linux-Tage logo

Some visitors to our booth told us about deployments of LibreOffice in their businesses and organisations, while others talked to us about interesting use cases of LibreOffice in education and other areas.

Thanks to the Linux-Tage organisers for a great meetup! Now we’re looking forward to more events this year – and especially the LibreOffice Conference 2023 in September… 😊

Participants talking to each other

Press Releases

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