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Improvements in LibreOffice’s PowerPoint presentation support

LibreOffice’s native file format is OpenDocument, a fully open and standardised format that’s great for sharing documents and long-term data storage. Of course, LibreOffice does its best to open files made by other office software as well, even if they’re stored in pseudo-“standards” with cryptic and obfuscated contents. Compatibility with PowerPoint PPT(X) presentations is therefore a challenge, but developers are working hard on improvements…

In September 2019, we announced an initiative to improve the support of PPT and PPTX files in LibreOffice. A year has passed since the last review and it is time to summarise achievements again.

Everyone is invited to participate in the PowerPoint support initiative, either in development or testing. If you are interested in joining, please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org.

Audio

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Added import and export support for slide narrations and their icons

Borders and fills

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Handle stroke properties of image shapes
Improve import of transparency in multi-step gradients

Before screenshot of bug 134183
Slide before Miklos’s fix

After screenshot of bug 134183
Slide after Miklos’s fix

Regina Henschel:
PPTX: transparency gradient on solid fill is not considered in export
Add fill to fontwork in export to PPTX

Charts

Zhenhua Fong (PPT/X team):
Chart background is white instead of Automatic/No fill plot area

Custom shapes

Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Handle greyscale effect on bitmap filled custom shapes (blog post)
Apply mirror property to custom cropped graphic (blog post)
Import support for custom stretch values (blog post)
Import crop position of bitmap filled shape (blog post)
Import graphics cropped into custom geometry as custom shapes (blog post)

Mark Hung (PPT/X team):
Export names of custom shapes

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Handle adjust values from both the custom shape and its placeholder

Tünde Tóth (NISZ):
Fix lost arcTo shape

Xisco Faulí (TDF):
PPT: export custom shapes as Bitmap

Hyperlinks

Tibor Nagy (NISZ):
Fix internal hyperlink to slide in PPTX
Fix lost direct hyperlink colors
Fix internal hyperlinks with PPTX export

Zhenhua Fong (PPT/X team):
Import hyperlinks from PPT

Tables

Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Table row height improvement in Impress (blog post)

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Shadow for tables from PPTX in Impress (blog post)

Tibor Nagy (NISZ):
Fix vertical alignment in exported table

Text boxes

Attila Bakos (NISZ):
Fix exporting of placeholders

Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Fix the placeholders priority order
Text box gets displaced by text coming from master page

Text in shapes

Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Camera Rotation Improvement (blog post)

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
SmartArt improvements in Impress, part 5 (blog post)
SmartArt improvements in Impress, part 6 (blog post)

Regina Henschel:
Text transformation “Deflate” is wrongly imported as “Inflate”
Wordart 3D is lost on round trip

Serge Krot (CIB):
Top-aligned text in imported PPTX becomes bottom-aligned

Various

Ahmad Ganzouri:
OOXML support for shadow blur

Bartosz Kosiorek (PPT/X team):
OOXML Fix storage of date in Custom Properties

Dániel Arató (NISZ):
Fix missing chart in exported PPTX

Gülşah Köse (Collabora):
Protect aspect ratio of graphic bullets
Import shadow size

Luboš Luňák (Collabora):
Load images in parallel
Implement PowerPoint ‘flash’ slide transition

Mike Kaganski (Collabora):
Support for transparency attribute of glow effect

Miklos Vajna (Collabora):
Crash fix for pyramid SmartArt import
Detecting 0-byte files based on extension in Impress and elsewhere (blog post)

Samuel Mehrbrodt (allotropia) and Piet van Oostrum:
Tab positions not being retained in PPT and being lost in PPTX

Tibor Nagy (NISZ):
Fix duplicated slide name with PPTX import

Vasily Melenchuk (CIB):
Support API-based MS-CRYPTO algorithms

Zhenhua Fong (PPT/X team):
Correct positions for group shapes
SmartArt caption text location is wrong

From left to right: PowerPoint, LibreOffice before Zhenhua’s fix, LibreOffice after the fix

LibreOffice 7.1.3 Community available for download

Berlin, May 6, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.1.3 Community, the third 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 7.1.3 includes over 100 bug fixes, with 25% focused on Microsoft Office file compatibility (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX).

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 7.1.3 Community

LibreOffice 7.1.3 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 7.0.5.

LibreOffice 7.1.3 change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.3/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/7.1.3/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 7.1.3 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

3D Objects: Making a Globe with LibreOffice

Regina Henschel shows you how to do some nifty 3D tricks in LibreOffice…

First, you need a world map in “Miller projection”. You find a suitable one on Wikipedia – download the full-size version. Here’s a thumbnail of it (CC-BY-SA, Daniel R. Strebe, August 2011):

Next, start LibreOffice Draw, and create a sphere from the “3D-Objects” toolbar.

Click the sphere to select it, right-click to bring up the context menu, and choose “Area”.

In the dialog box that appears, click on “Bitmap” and then on “Add/Import”. Select the downloaded map, and enter a name for it, that you will use in your collection of bitmaps. The image should be applied to the sphere. If not, select the map from the collection.

Then, in the “Options” part of the dialog box, select the item “Stretched” from the drop-down list “Style”. Click OK. Your globe is finished!

Now you can rotate the globe to the part of the earth you want to see – click on it once to show red corner controls, then once again to show orange; the latter can be used for rotation.

If you want to change the position of the “sun”, open the “3D Effects” dialog from the context menu. Select the tab “Illumination”. In the lower part drag the ball to the desired direction. And finally, apply it with the “Assign” icon top right.

Thanks to Regina for the tips! More guides for LibreOffice Draw, written by our documentation community, are available on this page. Check out the Draw Guide 6.4 for lots more info!

Annual Report: LibreOffice Conference 2020

The LibreOffice Conference is the annual gathering of the community, our end-users, developers, and everyone interested in free office software. Last year, it took place online – and was co-organised with the openSUSE project

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version will be posted here on the blog 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 ongoing 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 did so with the help of openSUSE, a GNU/Linux distribution project, which also has yearly conferences. There’s a lot of overlap between the openSUSE and LibreOffice projects – both produce free software for end users, and many people are active in both communities – so we decided to join forces and bring as many people together as possible.

The conference took place from 15 – 17 October, with sessions usually running from 10:00 to 21:00 (UTC). We created multiple Jitsi “rooms” for the various talks and presentations, along with extra rooms for social interaction and general chit-chat.

Conference Tracks

Following the opening session, presentations and talks were given across various “tracks” or categories: Development, Advocacy, Marketing, Design, Accessibility, Localisation, Documentation and more. There were highly technical talks focused on specific areas, 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, especially given that it was the first time we’ve run such a large event online.

Hackfest and Workshops

Outside of the conference tracks, there were several workshops covering certification, new tools to onboard contributors, strategic marketing, and the Google Summer of Code. On the final day of the conference, Ilmari Lauhakangas organised a Virtual Hackfest – an opportunity for developers to work together on features and bugs.

Full Programme

Full details about the event are available on openSUSE’s events page. For a quick overview of all the talks, including links to PDF versions of the presentations, see here. Videos of many of the talks are available as a playlist on our YouTube channel (or click here to watch them on PeerTube):

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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 monthly recap: April 2021

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

  • Meanwhile, the Council of the German city of Dortmund announced that it’s moving to free and open source software, where possible. This is great news: in the future, the city administration will have to justify why open source software cannot be used for every proprietary software application.

  • Our New Generation project, aimed at bringing new (and especially younger) contributors into the community, announced its first work: flyers to hand out in schools and universities. They’re available in many languages, and encourage younger people to not just use LibreOffice, but also get involved with it too.

  • Later in the month, we chatted with Necdet Yücel, who has been mentoring students and helping them to get involved with LibreOffice.

  • LibreOffice’s Macro Team wrote a progress report, listing documentation updates and code contributions from many community members. A big thanks to everyone who’s helping to improve LibreOffice’s macro support.

  • Our French community has been working on translations for LibreOffice user guides, so we thanked them with special Open Badges, containing custom metadata, recognising their achievements!

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!

Starting today: the Month of LibreOffice, May 2021!

If you’ve been using LibreOffice for a while, you may be wondering: who makes it? Well, the answer is: people like you! LibreOffice is a worldwide, community open source project – and many people who help to improve it, actually started out as regular users of the software.

So in May, we want to encourage you to get involved, join our community, and have fun. You can build up valuable skills for a future career – and you don’t need to be a programmer. There are many ways to help make LibreOffice awesome, as we’ll see in a moment.

And best of all: everyone who contributes to LibreOffice in May 2021 can claim a cool sticker pack, and has the chance to win extra LibreOffice merchandise such as mugs, hoodies, T-shirts, rucksacks and more (we’ll choose 10 participants at random at the end):

How to take part

So, let’s get started! There are many ways you can help out – and as mentioned, you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…

  • Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers.
  • First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 7.1.2”.
  • Drum Beater, spreading the word: tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter or Mastodon! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.
  • Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

We’ll be updating this page every day with usernames across our various services, as people contribute. So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker pack at the end as thanks from us! And who knows, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to win bonus merch as well…

Let’s go! We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon and Twitter accounts over the next four weeks – stay tuned!

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