LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community available for download

Berlin, June 10, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 7.1 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice 7.1.4 includes around 80 bug fixes, with 20% focused on Microsoft Office file compatibility (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX, and legacy DOCs).

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with long-term support options, professional assistance, custom features and Service Level Agreements: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

LibreOffice Community and the LibreOffice Enterprise family of products are based on the LibreOffice Technology platform, the result of years of development efforts with the objective of providing a state of the art office suite not only for the desktop but also for mobile and the cloud.

Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud. They may have a different name, according to each company brand, but they share the same LibreOffice unique advantages, robustness and flexibility.

Migrations to LibreOffice

The Document Foundation has developed a Migration Protocol to support enterprises moving from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, which is based on the deployment of a LTS version from the LibreOffice Enterprise family, plus migration consultancy and training sourced from certified professionals who offer CIOs and IT managers value-added solutions in line with proprietary offerings. Reference: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.

Availability of LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community

LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites. For users whose main objective is personal productivity and therefore prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the new features, The Document Foundation provides LibreOffice 7.0.6.

LibreOffice 7.1.4 change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.4/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.4/RC2 (changed in RC2).

LibreOffice Technology based products for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/, while for App Stores and ChromeOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-from-microsoft-and-mac-app-stores/.

LibreOffice individual users are assisted by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card or other tools at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

LibreOffice 7.1.4 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

LibreOffice Documentation Team Activities in 2020

In 2020, the documentation community released many updated guidebooks, translated them into several languages, and participated in the Google Season of Docs

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version is here.)

New and translated guides

In January 2020, just before release of LibreOffice 6.4, the Documentation Team was proud to announce the Math Guide 6.4, an update of the previous version (4.0), updated to cover all of the innovations included in the latest release of the software. The guide was updated by Roman Kuznetsov and revised by Dave Barton from the documentation community. This was followed by the Calc Guide 6.2, a long-awaited update of the old Calc Guide 4.4.

In May, the guide to Base for LibreOffice 6.2 was released, covering, LibreOffice’s database component. It was updated by Pulkit Krishna, Dan Lewis, Jean Hollis Weber, Alain Romedenne, Jean-Pierre Ledure and Randolph Gamo. Another update in May was the Getting Started Guide 6.4 – the introductory guide for the latest LibreOffice 6.4, aimed to the general public interested to quickly get familiar with the software. It’s available as a PDF for offline reading, and ODT (OpenDocument Text) for editors and translators.

In summer, the Documentation Team announced the availability of the LibreOffice Draw Guide 6.4, the complete handbook for the drawing tool of LibreOffice. The guide was updated from the existing release (4.3) and include all the improvements developed since early 2014, when the last version of the guide was published.

Then there was the LibreOffice Calc Guide 6.4, the complete handbook for the spreadsheet tool. It was also updated from the existing release (6.2) and included all of the improvements developed in Calc since then.

In October, the Math Guide 7.0 was published – being the first guide based on LibreOffice 7.0. The effort was mostly carried by Rafael Lima and reviewed by Jean H. Weber. The new guide covers were designed by Rizal Muttaqin and Drew Jensen. The final publication was carried by Olivier Hallot. This was followed by the Calc Guide 7.0, a team effort of Steve Fanning, Gordon Bates, Kees Kriek, Annie Nguyen, Samantha Hamilton, Olivier Hallot and Jean Hollis Weber, coordinated by Felipe Viggiano.

Many guides were also translated in to various languages, thanks to our worldwide communities. For more information on their work, and the specific guides that they translated, see the “Native Language “Projects” section of this Annual Report.

Google Season of Docs

For the second year in a row, The Document Foundation was accepted as an organization in the Google Season of Docs, a programme whose goals are to give technical writers an opportunity to participate in contributing to open source projects, and to give open source projects an opportunity to engage the technical writing community.

In 2020, TDF’s documentation community offered a wide range of projects for technical writers, and extended the reach by providing projects for e-learning, mathematical documentation and code-oriented documentation.

TDF received several applications, containing important information including the technical writer’s resumés, proposals for project schedule and suggested deliverables. After a careful evaluation by the project mentors, TDF accepted the application of Ronnie Gandhi, a computer science undergraduate student enrolled at IIT Roorkee, India.

Steve Fanning, who had already worked as coordinator of the Calc Guide, served as mentor with Olivier Hallot as second mentor. Ilmari Lauhakangas and Olivier managed the administrative aspects of the project on behalf of The Document Foundation.

Ronnie worked on improving the descriptions for Calc’s functions, adding statements describing each function’s compliance with the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) Version 1.2 specification. Each function was also supplemented by extra use cases, illustrations and external references (where applicable).

Access the Extensive Calc Functions Description on The Document Foundation’s wiki. Thanks to Ronnie for all his work, and the mentors for assisting him on his journey.

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!

Announcing the winners in the Month of LibreOffice, May 2021!

At the beginning of May, we started 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…

Fantastic! This makes it the most successful Month of LibreOffice ever, slightly overtaking the results from May 2020.

Great 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 May 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: 10 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 – we’ll get in touch personally with the details:

  • Michael Warner
  • Jorge Gustavo Rocha
  • Roland Kurmann
  • Astur
  • Alessandro Volturno
  • Harshita Nag
  • Érico Nogueira
  • Chris Shaw
  • Wanderer
  • María del Mar

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 in November, but everyone is welcome to see what they can do for LibreOffice at any time!

REMINDER LibreOffice Conference Call for Papers

LibreOffice Conference Call for Papers is open until June 30, 2021. Thanks to the efforts of TDF infra team led by Guilhem Moulin, you can now submit your proposal using TDF brand new event management platform at https://events.documentfoundation.org/libocon2021/cfp. We know that you were all eager to use that platform for your proposals, and now you don’t have any excuse for a further delay of your submission!

LibreOffice Conference 2021 will take place online from September 23 to 25, Thursday to Saturday. The Document Foundation invites all members and contributors to submit talks, lectures and workshops. Whether you are a seasoned presenter or have never spoken in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice, ODF, the Document Liberation Project or the ODF Toolkit, we want to hear from you!

Proposals should be filed by June 30, 2021, in order to guarantee that they will be considered for inclusion in the conference program.

The conference program will be based on the following tracks:

  • a) Development, APIs, Extensions, Future Technology
  • b) Quality Assurance
  • c) Localization, Documentation and Native Language Projects
  • d) Appealing Libreoffice: Ease of Use, Design and Accessibility
  • e) Open Document Format, Document Liberation and Interoperability
  • f) Advocating, Promoting, Marketing LibreOffice
  • g) Diversity and Inclusion, New Generation Project for Students’ Inclusion

Presentations, case studies and technical talks will discuss a subject in depth and will last 30 minutes (including Q&A), while Workshops will last 90 minutes (including Q&A). Lightning talks will cover a specific topic and will last 5 minutes (including Q&A). Sessions will be streamed live and recorded for download.

If you do not agree to provide the data for the talk under the “Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License”, please explicitly state your terms. In order to make your presentation available on TDF YouTube and PeerTube channels, please do not submit talks containing copyrighted material (music, pictures, etc.).

If you want to give multiple talks, please submit a separate proposal for each one, using the submission form at the following address (is always the same): https://events.documentfoundation.org/libocon2021/cfp.

Thanks a lot for your participation!

LibreOffice monthly recap: May 2021 – Community activities

Check out our summary of what happened in the LibreOffice community last month…

  • Right on the first day of May, we started a new Month of LibreOffice, showing our thanks to everyone involved in the LibreOffice project and community. Everyone who contributes during the month can get a sticker pack – and a chance to win extra merch. We’ll announce the full winners here in the next few days!

  • Did you know that you can work with 3D objects in LibreOffice? Long-time community member Regina Henschel wrote a tutorial showing how to make a 3D globe, using a map and a sphere. Rather neat…

  • In May, TDF announced two bugfix updates for LibreOffice: 7.0.6 and 7.1.3. This marks the last release of the 7.0 branch – from here on, we will be maintaining the LibreOffice 7.1 series.

  • Meanwhile, the PowerPoint compatibility team reported on its recent work, showing how PPTX presentations are imported more accurately into recent versions of LibreOffice. Of course, when you’re working on a presentation in LibreOffice, its best to use its native format – OpenDocument.

  • LibreOffice is free and open source software, available for anyone to use, modify and share – and that will always be the case. At the same time, we really appreciate the contributions of companies in the wider LibreOffice ecosystem, who sell long-term support (LTS) versions and other benefits, and add many features to the codebase. So spread awareness of them, we’ve set up some LinkedIn pages for the “LibreOffice Enterprise” brands.

  • The Google Summer of Code begins! This is a programme that connects students with free and open source software projects.We announced the list of selected projects – and we’re really looking forward to seeing the results. Good luck to all the students, and thanks to the mentors for helping them!

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 for everyone!

Albanian Community Meeting – May 2021

While many pandemic restrictions around the world are still in place, some smaller events are finally becoming possible. Sidorela Uku from the Albanian LibreOffice community reports from a recent event in Tirana, which hosted the LibreOffice Conference 2018:

There were eight people present at this meeting. We had a short presentation about LibreOffice – what it includes, and its features. Also, we introduced the various ways how someone can become part of the community. We are planing to have more events in the future, as there are a few people interested in localization, but as well for people who want to switch and use LibreOffice. Also, we translated a few strings on the whatcanIdoforlibreoffice.org website, and pushed the changes to Gerrit.

Thanks to the community in Tirana for their work and support! It’s great to see some in-person events becoming possible again. LibreOffice users around the world are welcome to join our project, and help to build up local communities. If there’s no LibreOffice community in your area, drop us a line and we’ll help you to establish one!