LibreOffice project and community recap: November 2022

Recap banner

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

  • November was a Month of LibreOffice! This is something we do every six months, to say our thanks to everyone who contributes to the project – and encourage others to join in. 307 people won sticker packs – and a few others got some special bonus LibreOffice merchandise 😉

LibreOffice merchandise

  • Throughout the month, we edited and uploaded videos from our recent LibreOffice Conference 2022. All videos should be on this playlist now, apart from a couple which had problems with the sound:

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Regina Henschel

  • Early in November, we announced LibreOffice 7.3.7, which is planned as the last release in the 7.3 branch. Users still using this version should start looking at the LibreOffice 7.4 family, now at 7.4.2, which has been extensively tested by millions of users worldwide. And later in the month, we released LibreOffice 7.4.3.

LibreOffice 7.3 banner

  • FOSDEM, the biggest European free software event, is coming up – and the first in-person meeting since 2022. Of course, LibreOffice and The Document Foundation will be there, and we put out a Call for Papers for the LibreOffice Technology devroom. See you there!

FOSDEM logo

Indonesian community group photo

Muthuramalingam Krishnan

  • Did you know? You can dock colour palettes in many places in LibreOffice Draw. Harald Berger, from the German LibreOffice community, made a video demonstrating this:

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Stéphane Guillou

  • Earlier in 2022, together with more than 100 European organisations and companies, The Document Foundation signed the Open Letter about the universal right to install any software on any device. Join us and sign the letter today.

Impress Guide cover

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!

Winners in the Month of LibreOffice, November 2022!

At the start of November, we began a new Month of LibreOffice, celebrating community contributions all across the project. We do these every six months – so how many people got sticker packs this time? Check it out…

Awesome work, everyone! Hundreds of people, all across the globe, have helped out in our projects and communities. We’re hugely thankful for your contributions – and, of course, everyone who’s listed on the wiki page can get a sticker pack, with these stickers and more:

How to claim

If you see your name (or username) on this page, get in touch! Email mike.saunders@documentfoundation.org with your name (or username) from the wiki page so that we can check, along with your postal address, and we’ll send you a bunch of stickers for your PC, laptop and other kit.

(Note: your address will only be used to post the stickers, and will be deleted immediately afterwards.) If you contributed to the project in November but you’re not on the wiki page, please let us know what you did, so that we can add you!

There is one more thing…

And we have an extra bonus: nine contributors have also been selected at random to get an extra piece of merchandise – a LibreOffice hoodie, T-shirt, rucksack or snazzy glass mug. Here are the winners (names or usernames) – we’ll get in touch personally with the details:

  • Aleksandar Popovic
  • vibrationoflife
  • Benyamin Limanto
  • Jürgen Kirsten
  • Tarcísio Ladeia de Oliveira
  • Omkar Acharekar
  • Jaroslav Kratochvil
  • Ettore Atalan
  • William Friedman

Congratulations to all the winners, and a big thanks once again to everyone who took part! Your contributions keep the LibreOffice project strong. We plan to have another Month of LibreOffice next year, but everyone is welcome to see what they can do for LibreOffice at any time!

Getting Started Guide 7.4 and Impress Guide 7.4 Available for Download

The LibreOffice Documentation Team announces the immediate availability of the Impress Guide 7.4 and Getting Started Guide 7.4

The Impress Guide 7.4 was coordinated by Peter Schofield and revised by Kees Kriek. The guide is available in PDF as well as in ODF formats. An online version is available in the bookshelf website.

Impress Guide 7.4

The Getting Started Guide 7.4 update was coordinated by Skip Masonsmith also with the revision of Kees Kriek and Jean Weber.

Getting Started Guide 7.4

The LibreOffice Community thanks Peter, Skip, Kees and Jean for their immense contribution to our documentation assets and knowledge.

Docmentation Team

The Guides can be downloaded or purchased in printed version from the Documentation website as well as the bookshelf project.

LibreOffice Conference 2022 videos: Arabic/Persian/Klingon support, wiki cleaning, project sustainability

Here’s another batch of talks from the recent LibreOffice Conference 2022! Watch the individual videos below, or click here to view the playlist.

 

Arabic/Persian Text Justification: An Overview, with Hossein Nourikhah

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The state of Right-to-Left language support in LibreOffice, with Eyal Rozenberg

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Let’s try NLP of Klingon language using LibreOffice, with Koji Annoura

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We keep the wiki squeaky clean, with Ilmari Lauhakangas

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Improve the project sustainability, with Italo Vignoli

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Release of LibreOffice 7.4.3 Community

Berlin, November 24, 2022 – LibreOffice 7.4.3 Community, the third maintenance release of LibreOffice 7.4, the volunteer-supported office suite for personal productivity on the desktop, is immediately available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download for Windows (Intel and Arm processors), macOS (Apple M1 and Intel processors), and Linux.

LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite market segment, with native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats for security and robustness – to superior support for MS Office files, to filters for a large number of legacy document formats, to return ownership and control to users.

A description of all new features of the LibreOffice 7.4.x releases is available in the Release Notes: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.4

A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 7.4 Community is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC8M4UzqpqE and PeerTube: https://peertube.opencloud.lu/w/myZUTCytN28kuxDa5VXNgh.

LibreOffice Technology Platform

Products based on the LibreOffice Technology platform – the transactional engine shared by all LibreOffice based products, which provides a rock solid solution with a high level of coherence and interoperability – 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): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/. All code developed by ecosystem companies for enterprise customers is shared with the community and improves the LibreOffice Technology platform.

LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and LTS options from certified partners – is the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 7.4.3 Community

LibreOffice 7.4.3 Community is available from: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.12. LibreOffice Technology-based products for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/

Users still deploying the LibreOffice 7.3 family because of the additional testing and bug fixing, should switch immediately to LibreOffice 7.4.3, which has been extensively tested by millions of users worldwide, as the older version will reach the end of life and will not be maintained after November 30, 2022.

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: https://ask.libreoffice.org
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate

Welcome Stéphane Guillou, new QA Analyst for LibreOffice

Photo portrait of Stéphane Guillou

We have a new team member at The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice! (That means we’re now 13 people.) Stéphane Guillou joins us as a Quality Assurance Analyst – so let’s get to know him better:

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I am from France, with roots also in Peru, but lived for the last 10 years in Australia with my awesome little family before coming back to France. We now live in Alsace, close to the forest in the Vosges mountains.

I studied plants, ecology and sustainability before working in agricultural research. I am still very passionate about plants and the environment, but my focus has moved towards supporting researchers in their data analysis, promoting Open Science principles and offering training about FLOSS research software, which I was able to do for the last 4 years at the University of Queensland’s Library, and before that as a certified instructor of the Carpentries organisation.

I am passionate about sharing information about Open Science, and contributing data to the Commons. You can for example find me on other wonderful projects like OpenStreetMap, iNaturalist and MusicBrainz.

When I am not parenting or working, I like spending time on electronic music, amateur radio and cycling.

What’s your new role at The Document Foundation?

I am the new Quality Assurance (QA) Analyst, and a lot of my time will be spent on triaging the issues users report on Bugzilla – our bug-reporting platform. There is a lot of activity on Bugzilla, and classifying and testing the reports is fundamental for us to focus on the most pressing issues, help the work developers are doing, and keep improving the software for everyone! Part of the work will also be to analyse and summarise the wealth of data available to help us see the bigger picture and make better decisions when allocating resources.

Pie chart showing the split between resolved bug statuses on Bugzilla. Four main categories are fixed (40.7%), duplicate (18.8%), insufficient data (13.1%) and works for me (12.5%).

Pie chart showing the split between resolved bug statuses on Bugzilla. Four main categories are “fixed” (40.7%), “duplicate” (18.8%), “insufficient data” (13.1%) and “works for me” (12.5%).

How did you get involved in LibreOffice, before you joined TDF?

I have used LibreOffice since it was first released in 2011, and have always liked reporting problems and helping out with the QA process in little bursts, just like I like doing with any FLOSS tool I use. I feel it’s a great way to give back to the community.

How can regular users of LibreOffice help out with the QA project?

Everyone can help our QA project by first using the software, and reporting problems when you encounter them. Have a look if the issue has been reported before, and if not, you might have found a new one! It’s important to not assume that someone has reported the issue before you. LibreOffice is a very customisable and rich office suite, so people use it in vastly different ways.

If you want to help some more, feel free to install development versions to test them, look at reports on Bugzilla to confirm issues and classify them, identify exactly when an issue arose (it’s called “bibisecting“), and share your learnings and processes with others! There is a wealth of tasks you can start on on our Wiki.

Thank you for your help building an office suite for all!

We’re really happy to have Stéphane on board! Donations from LibreOffice users help us to grow our team, maintain our infrastructure and support the communities working on LibreOffice. Support us here!