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Annual Report: LibreOffice Conference 2021

The LibreOffice Conference is the annual gathering of the community, our end-users, developers, and everyone interested in free office software. This year, it took place online once again.

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2021 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

Normally, the conference takes place at a different venue each year, to reflect the international and diverse LibreOffice community. For instance, in 2019 we were in Almeria, in 2018 in Tirana, and in 2017 in Rome. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, though, we decided to move the conference online in 2020. This wasn’t an easy decision, as face-to-face meetups are important for free and open source software projects, but we focused on making it work.

We faced the same situation in 2021: ideally, we would have had an in-person conference, but uncertainty surrounding travel restrictions and containment measures means that we decided to move the conference online for another year.

The conference took place from 23 – 25 September, with sessions usually running from 10:00 to 16:00 (UTC). We created multiple Jitsi “rooms” for the various talks and presentations, along with extra channels for social interaction and general chit-chat via IRC, Matrix and Telegram. Although the conference was online, some members of the German community met in-person in Hamburg.

Here’s a video of the opening session (also available on PeerTube):

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Conference Tracks

Following the opening session, presentations and talks were given across various “tracks”, or categories: Development, Advocacy, Marketing, Design, OpenDocument Format, Quality Assurance, Documentation and more. There were highly technical talks focused on specific areas of the software and source code, along with more open discussions about community building and recent updates from The Document Foundation.

On the final day, the conference wrapped up with a closing session, headed by TDF’s Chairman, Lothar Becker. He thanked the presenters and all attendees for their support and contributions to the conference.

Sponsoring and merchandise

The event was sponsored by Collabora, allotropia, the Linux Professional Institute, Omnis Private & Hybrid Cloud, and Carbone.io. Conference merchandise was provided by FreeWear, a company that specialises in clothing items and other merchandise for free and open source software projects.

Full Programme

Full details about the event are available on the main conference website. For a quick overview of all the talks, including links to PDF versions of the presentations, see the schedule. Videos from most of the talks are available as a playlist on our YouTube channel, and on PeerTube:

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Conference in 2022

At the time of writing, we are hoping to organise an in-person conference in northern Italy, in late September. We will post updates on this blog as we get closer to the event.

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

Annual Report 2021: LibreOffice releases and updates

In 2021, LibreOffice celebrated its eleventh 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 2021 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

The Document Foundation announced two major releases of LibreOffice in 2021: version 7.1 on February 3, and version 7.2 on August 19. In addition 13 minor releases were also made available:

  • LibreOffice 7.1.1 – March 4
  • LibreOffice 7.0.5 – March 12
  • LibreOffice 7.1.2 – April 1
  • LibreOffice 7.1.3 – May 6
  • LibreOffice 7.0.6 – May 13
  • LibreOffice 7.1.4 – June 10
  • LibreOffice 7.1.5 – July 22
  • LibreOffice 7.1.6 – September 9
  • LibreOffice 7.2.1 – September 16
  • LibreOffice 7.1.7 – November 4
  • LibreOffice 7.2.3 – November 25
  • LibreOffice 7.2.4 and 7.1.8 – December 6

In July, our Quality Assurance community organised a Bug Hunting Session in preparation for the release of LibreOffice 7.2. This was based on the first Release Candidate (RC), and we encouraged technically-minded users to try out the RC and help to identify and fix bugs before the final release. Communication took part on our QA IRC channel, which is also bridged to a Telegram group. The session ran from 07:00 UTC to 19:00 UTC.

LibreOffice 7.1

On February 3, LibreOffice 7.1 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at Collabora, allotropia, CIB, Red Hat, NISZ, The Document Foundation and other companies and organisations – along with volunteers – worked on many new features. For instance, a new dialog was added which lets users select their desired user interface design on first startup (including the regular menu+toolbar setup, and NotebookBar alternative).

In Writer, a new Style Inspector was created to display the attributes of Paragraph and Character Styles, and manually formatted (Direct Formatting) properties. In Calc, significant speed improvements for Autofilter and find/replace operations were implemented, while the possibility to add visible signatures to existing PDF files in Draw was included too. On top of the new features, there were many other general improvements to performance, compatibility and stability.

With the help of the Indonesian community, TDF produced a video to explain and demonstrate many of the new features in LibreOffice 7.1. 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.

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LibreOffice 7.2

Later in the year, on August 19, TDF released LibreOffice 7.2. 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 addition, LibreOffice 7.2 Community offered numerous performance improvements in handling large files, opening certain DOCX and XLSX files, managing font caching, and opening presentations and drawings that contain large images. There were also drawing speed improvements when using the Skia back-end that was introduced with LibreOffice 7.1.

A popup list to search for menu commands was added to the user interface, helping new users to find features that may otherwise be tucked away inside the menu. In addition, a built-in “Xray”-like UNO object inspector was implemented, along with a new list view for the Templates dialog. In Writer, background fills were updated to cover whole pages, beyond margins, while in Calc, HTML tables listed in the External Data dialogue now show captions. Impress was boosted with a set of new templates, to make presentations more attractive and appealing: Candy, Freshes, Grey Elegant, Growing Liberty, Yellow Idea and more.

Many other features were added as well, and there were a large number of compatibility improvements. As with the previous release, the TDF team worked with the Indonesian LibreOffice community to make a video to demonstrate the new features:

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

LibreOffice project and community recap: March 2022

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

  • We started off March with a custom shape tutorial from Regina Henschel. If you’ve ever tried to draw special and complex shapes beyond the basic offerings of LibreOffice, check it out!

  • During March, TDF released two new updates for LibreOffice: 7.3.1 and 7.3.2. These fix bugs and improve compatibility – so all users of the 7.3 branch are recommended to update. (We also released LibreOffice 7.2.6 on March 10.)

  • Meanwhile, the Czech community worked on a translation of the LibreOffice Base Guide 6.4. Thanks to Marcela Tomešová, Martin Kasper, Zdeněk Crhonek, Jan Martinovský, Roman Toman and Miloš Šrámek for their great work! 👍

  • How can we make free and open source software development sustainable in the long term? Mike Saunders from The Document Foundation appeared on the Sustain OSS podcast to talk about this issue, along with the challenges and opportunities in building communities.

  • In the middle of the month, the Board of Directors at The Document Foundation started its new term. Welcome to new new members, and thank you to those who are moving on, for all their work and support.

  • Companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem contribute many features and fixes to the software, and provide long-term support (LTS) versions and other benefits. We caught up with Michael Meeks of Collabora Productivity to find out what his team has been working on in recent versions of the suite.

  • And finally, our documentation team announced the Writer Guide 7.3. This covers all aspects of the word processing component in LibreOffice, and is well worth keeping on your (digital) bookshelf…

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!

LibreOffice ecosystem interview: Michael Meeks at Collabora Productivity

Following our interviews with Caolán McNamara at Red Hat and Thorsten Behrens at allotropia, today we’re talking to Michael Meeks from Collabora Productivity:

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m Michael Meeks, a Christian, husband and enthusiastic open source developer. I run Collabora’s Office division with the assistance of an amazing team – leading our Collabora Online and Office products, and supporting customers and partners. I’ve served as a Director of the The Document Foundation from its founding until recently, and have contributed to both the OpenDocument Format and OOXML standardization.

I’d started some decades ago working on the Linux desktop in the GNOME project around the Gnumeric spreadsheet, first as a volunteer, then for Ximian – which was involved in the open-sourcing of OpenOffice.org. Since then, I’ve been involved with improving the codebase, although the name of my employer has changed from Ximian, Novell, Attachmate, Micro Focus, SUSE – and finally being spun out alongside a brave and talented subset of the SUSE LibreOffice team to Collabora Productivity some nine years ago.

What does Collabora Productivity provide in the LibreOffice ecosystem?

One big piece we do is improving the awesome LibreOffice Technology core engine / APIs, and performance for Collabora Online – which provides a real alternative to Microsoft Office 365 – with collaborative editing in the browser. We spend time working hard on integrations with popular open source products like Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, EGroupware, and proprietary ones such as HiDrive, Filr – as well as helping hosting providers like Strato provide LibreOffice Technology to their users en-masse.

Around Collabora Online, we have a mission to allow you to control your documents. That means full control from open source software, open standard file formats, through to on-premise hosting, and full network control. It is encouraging to see the growing consensus these days between e.g. The European Pirate Party (enthusiastic Collabora Online users) talking positively about the importance of Digital Sovereignty, and at another pole – for instance, the head of the UK’s MI6 warning on the BBC:

“The data-trap is this: that if you allow another country to gain access to really critical data about your society, over time that will erode your sovereignty.”

For Collabora’s customers, we also take a new LibreOffice version each year and freeze this as our Long-Term Support (LTS) base; we create many hundreds of fixes and feature patches which we contribute up-stream, as well as back-porting the latest fixes to our enterprise branch: much as is done for an enterprise Linux distribution. We sell that toegher with services and support as Collabora Office. We also maintain a tool (Collabora OLE Automation Tool) to ease migration of vertical applications that use Visual Basic / OLE2 integration that makes LibreOffice behave like Microsoft Office via COM. In addition, we maintain Collabora Office and LibreOffice Windows Group Policy Templates – these make it easy to manage lots of LibreOffice machines via Group Policy.

Another strand of work is re-packaging Collabora Online / LibreOffice Technology as responsive mobile apps for Android and iOS, as well as Chrome OS. By delivering LibreOffice-based document editing to everyone’s browsers, PCs and mobile devices, we give people a real alternative that lets them choose their own document formats, security profile and threat model – real digital sovereignty.

What has Collabora been working on in LibreOffice 7.3?

We’ve been working on lots of things: some of the team have done a lot for interoperability, e.g. Miklos improving writer’s paragraph styling, or Dennis making charts more compatible, or Sarper re-working our PowerPoint header/footer interoperability. There is a constant stream of improvements based on customer feedback here.

Another big set of improvements in LibreOffice 7.3 are from Lubos and Noel around the performance of file opening, rendering, editing of documents as well as improving calculation threading. One particularly important piece here was the work done to very significantly improve performance of lots of editors in a single file – which has been back-ported to make Collabora Online very much faster in our latest releases.

We are looking forward to upgrading to LibreOffice 7.3 in the next months, and not having to carry these back-ports forward.

What new features are you particularly happy with?

I’ve been really pleased with the work we’ve done alongside AMD around Skia rendering – in LibreOffice 7.3 we make that the default for macOS (users, please report any problems), which for the first time allows us to share a single, modern rendering API between macOS, Linux and Windows for rendering – which is a huge step in the right direction.

What’s more: adding WebP support for images – interestingly, Firefox now requires this as a copy/paste format for images, and it’s long overdue to have this high quality format from Google supported.

Looking beyond this release, what else are you planning to do?

We work continuously on LibreOffice, all around the code from ongoing clean-ups, performance work, unit-tests (particularly important to avoid customer tickets regressing) and so on. We have a few things that are in the works currently.

Another thing that Tomaz, Sarper and Miklos will debut in LibreOffice 7.4 is the start of colour theme support for shapes, to allow us to re-style documents more deeply by changing the theme and palette. This should also help with interoperability and templating.

We’ve also added Sparkline support, providing a very pretty and useful way to quickly visualize data for LibreOffice 7.4.

You can read about the history of these from Edward Tufte.

Lubos has been working hard on jumbo sheets – allowing much larger number of columns in sheets (and more rows too) which should make interoperability much smoother for people with large spreadsheets.

And of course lots more – we’re expecting LibreOffice 7.4 to be packed with new and enhanced feature / function from the whole community – and Collabora.

Find out more

Join the Indian LibreOffice community!

Across the globe, LibreOffice communities help to improve the software, translate the user interface, update documentation and spread the word. You can see a list of international projects on this page, and today we’re announcing communication channels for the Indian LibreOffice community!

Check them out – they’re bridged together, so you only need to join one to take part:

So, join in and let’s help to spread the word about LibreOffice – and grow the community – in India!

Of course, it’s a large and diverse country, so here are a few images that reflect its diversity…

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus – Amnydv1710, CC-BY-SA

 

Sikh pilgrim at the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) in Amritsar – Paulrudd, CC-BY-SA

 

Red Fort – Closer view of the top part of the gate above the Meena Bazaar – Dennis Jarvis, CC-BY-SA

 

Constitution of India

Build up your skills, and learn exciting new things!

LibreOffice is made by a worldwide community of volunteers, certified developers and many other people. Every summer, we participate in the Google Summer of Code programme: this is focused on introducing contributors to open source software development, and last year LibreOffice received a bunch of new features and improvements thanks to the work of several contributors.

We’re super happy to announce that LibreOffice, once again, is part of this year’s Summer of Code (GSoC). If you’re a contributor, want to improve your programming skills and receive a financial stipend to implement new features in LibreOffice, get involved! You can get in contact with us, show us that you’ve learnt the basics by working on an Easy Hack from the category “difficultyInteresting”, and then propose your project(s). We’re looking forward to hearing from you and seeing your work!

Click here to get started

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