Home » LibreOffice » Page 93

Category: LibreOffice

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!

LibreOffice IRC channels moving to Libera.Chat

Many projects in the LibreOffice community use IRC (Internet Relay Chat) to communicate. This is a real-time text-based communication protocol that’s popular amongst many free and open source software projects.

We are moving our IRC channels to a new host, Libera.Chat, which is run by a Swedish non-profit organisation. Here’s an alphabetical list of the current channels – for more information, see our wiki:

  • #libreoffice
  • #libreoffice-de
  • #libreoffice-design
  • #libreoffice-dev
  • #libreoffice-doc
  • #libreoffice-fi
  • #libreoffice-fr
  • #libreoffice-gsoc
  • #libreoffice-hackfest
  • #libreoffice-NLP
  • #libreoffice-qa
  • #libreoffice-telegram
  • #tdf-infra

Thanks to everyone who participates in our IRC channel discussions, and keeps LibreOffice moving forward!

Annual Report 2020: TDF and LibreOffice infrastructure

In 2020, the infrastructure team added new services, implemented a new Extensions and Templates site, and worked on a replacement for Ask LibreOffice

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

LibreOffice’s infrastructure team is responsible for maintaining the hardware, virtual machines and services that enable the wider community to develop, market, test, localize and improve the software. The public infrastructure is powered by around 50 kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs) spread across four hypervisors, plugged to an internal 10Gbps switch, hosted at Manitu in St. Wendel (Germany), and managed with libvirt and its KVM/QEMU driver. The virtual disk images are typically stored in GlusterFS volumes – distributed across the hypervisors – except for some transient disks (such as cache) where the IOPS requirement is higher and the redundancy less important.

In 2020, the infra team added various new services, such as the new SilverStripe-based Extensions and Templates site. Some background to the technical and design decisions behind the site are here on the blog.

Meanwhile, Discourse was investigated as a likely AskBot replacement, while several VMs for deployment tests outside the scope of infra were handed over (such as decidim). The infra team worked on Moodle (an e-learning platform), build bots, integration of the Weblate translation platform into the TDF development dashboard, and a crashtest box (sponsored by Adfinis).

Along with the new services, there were many notable upgrades too. Some machines are still running Debian GNU/Linux 9 (codename Stretch), but most are now upgraded to Debian 10 (codename Buster). Other updates include: Nextcloud 16 to 20, Gerrit 2.16 to 3.2, LibreOffice Online 6.3 to 7.0, and Mediawiki 1.31 to 1.35. Finally, OpenGrok, Etherpad Lite, Weblate and the Grimoire dashboard received updates too.

Notable refactoring/improvements took place in the online help backend, along with the backends for bibisecting and mailing lists. The team started collecting metrics for download counters and the update checker, and worked on improving IRC bots, the monitoring setup, and a distributed backup solution.

Documentation was improved to make onboarding of new infra team members easier, while the SSO (Single Sign-On authentication) system was expanded with more services: Gerrit, the new extension site, Discourse, Jitsi and Moodle.

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!

Get printed copies of LibreOffice handbooks!

LibreOffice’s Documentation Team writes, updates and translates many handbooks. These are full of tips, tricks and tutorials covering the whole office suite. You can find PDF and ODT versions on this page – but sometimes it’s nice to have a hard-copy, printed version, right?

Well, you can get those too! Our community has made these available via the online bookshop Lulu (which was started by Red Hat co-founder Bob Young). These are printed on-demand, in various facilities around the world, and have global shipping.

So, if you want to learn more about LibreOffice but fancy a break from your computer screen, check them out!

Projects selected for LibreOffice in the Google Summer of Code 2021

In March, we announced that LibreOffice will be participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a programme that connects students with free and open source software projects. GSoC helps students to implement new features, and provides them with financial support along the way.

Well, the projects have been selected, so here they are!

  • Bayram Çiçek – 100 Paper Cuts: This aims to improve LibreOffice’s user interface, implementing enhancement requests and solving the most annoying UX (user experience) issues.
  • Anshu Khare – Sidebar: It’s planned to revamp the current styles deck sidebar and to merge paragraph and character styles into one Text Style deck. Furthermore, the student wants to rework the filter workflow. Here’s a mockup (click for larger):

  • Tushar Kumar – Implement an interface for external data source import in Calc: Currently, Calc’s back-end data provider supports CSV, HTML, XML and and Base’s data provider. This feature is not yet ready for production, however, so this project’s goal is to improve it. Here’s a mockup:

  • Balázs Sántha – Implement table styles in OOXML (.docx) support: At the moment, table styles found in .docx documents are converted into direct formatting at at Writer’s core level. This project aims to take a step towards a solution for handling proper table styles.

  • Panos Korovesis – Make the SVM format independent of the VCL metafile + tests for the format: This requires the completion of the tests regarding SVM, and then the separation of the read and write functionality of MetaActions to new distinct classes.
  • Akshit Kushwaha – Tests for the VCL graphics back-end: Add more test cases to the pre-existing tests, running those tests in every back-end, and implement a usable UI for the users to test the graphic’s feasibility themselves. This should make graphics rendering smoother.
  • Shubham Jain – Write missing unit tests: Extend the tests in Libreoffice. There are currently more than 1300 bugs fixes which do not have tests written for them, so this project aims to bring down that number.

Good luck to all the students – we appreciate their work on these important features and improvements! And thanks to our mentors for assisting them: Heiko Tietze, Xisco Fauli, lmari Lauhakangas, Olivier Hallot and Christian Lohmeier (The Document Foundation); Tomaž Vajngerl, Muhammet Kara, Luboš Luňák, Miklos Vajna and Mike Kaganski (Collabora); Thorsten Behrens (allotropia); László Németh and Markus Mohrhard.

From August 16 – 23, students will submit their code, project summaries, and final evaluations of their mentors. Find out more about the timeline here, and check out more details about the projects on this page.

Press Releases

The Document Foundation Releases LibreOffice 26.2.1 with Contributions from Community and Ecosystem Partners

Videos describing new features available on YouTube and PeerTube Berlin, 26 February 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the…

Open Document Format

LibreOffice for Education: Regaining Digital Sovereignty

Every year, millions of students open a laptop and log into Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, surrendering their digital sovereignty…