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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!

Open Badges for French Math Guide translators!

Thanks to localisation volunteers around the world, LibreOffice’s documentation is available in many languages. Today, we want to say thanks to the French community of translators, who localised the guide for LibreOffice Math 7.0 – great work, everyone!

Each translator gets an Open Badge from The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice. These are special, custom images with embedded metadata, confirming the contributions.

So, if you got a badge, feel free to share it on your blog, social media, Git page and other places! And indeed use it as proof of your abilities, when joining another project or looking for work! You can verify your badge here.

The recipients:

  • Sango BARKER-GILES
  • Maëlle GONZALEZ
  • Ornella NGUENANG LOWE
  • Célian LIMOUSIN
  • Baptiste LECUYER

Enjoy, and thanks again! Stay tuned to this blog for more Open Badges in coming months…

LibreOffice Macro Team: progress report

Macros help users to automate common tasks in LibreOffice. In September 2019 we announced a new team in our community to work on macro support. The last progress report was published in April 2020, so it is high time to look into what has happened since then.

If you are interested in contributing to the macro team (development, testing or documentation), we’d love to hear from you – please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org and we’ll get in touch.

ScriptForge Libraries

The biggest single event was the introduction of ScriptForge Libraries in LibreOffice 7.1. ScriptForge and its documentation is a collaboration betwen Jean-Pierre Ledure, Alain Romedenne and Rafael Lima. You can read more about it in the January 2021 blog post and the work-in-progress Help content.

Wiki docs

Nathan Ullberg continued working on Impress macro articles.

Celia Palacios improved the Python guide and added new macro tutorials, such as populating spreadsheets with data from an SQL database.

Alain Romedenne continued adding syntax diagrams and improved and expanded the Python guide and macro articles.

Mauricio Baeza improved and expanded articles and added new ones, such as Insert a comment with custom presets, Copy content cell from Spreadsheet to other and Charts in Calc.

Steve Fanning added several new examples of Calc macros.

Code contributions from macro team members

Alain Romedenne:

Andreas Heinisch:

George Bateman:

Tomoyuki Kubota:

Code contributions from honorary associate members

Compatibility fixes for Python 3.8 to 3.12 done by David Ostrovsky, Dante Doménech, Noel Grandin (Collabora) and Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat).

Anshu Khare:

Arnaud Versini:

  • Many cleanups and optimisations in Basic handling code

Arpit Bandejiya:

Caolán McNamara (Red Hat):

John Turpish:

Maxim Monastirsky:

Michael Stahl (allotropia):

Mike Kaganski (Collabora):

Noel Grandin (Collabora):

Serge Krot (CIB):

Shubham Jain:

Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat):

Tushar Kumar Rai:

Xisco Fauli (TDF):

Help content

Improved by Alain Romedenne:

Added by Alain Romedenne:

Improved by Rafael Lima:

Improved by Olivier Hallot (TDF):

Added by Olivier Hallot (TDF):

Annual Report: LibreOffice in 2020

In 2020, LibreOffice celebrated its tenth 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 2020 – the full version will be posted here on the blog soon.)

The Document Foundation announced two major releases of LibreOffice in 2020: version 6.4 on January 29, and version 7.0 on August 5. In addition, 13 minor releases were made available over the year:

RELEASE DATE
LibreOffice 6.3.5 February 20
LibreOffice 6.4.1 February 27
LibreOffice 6.4.2 March 19
LibreOffice 6.4.3 April 16
LibreOffice 6.3.6 April 30
LibreOffice 6.4.4 May 21
LibreOffice 6.4.5 July 2
LibreOffice 6.4.6 August 13
LibreOffice 7.0.1 September 3
LibreOffice 7.0.2 October 8
LibreOffice 6.4.7 October 22
LibreOffice 7.0.3 October 29
LibreOffice 7.0.4 December 17

Throughout the year, we held three Bug Hunting Sessions in preparation for new major releases. These typically took place on a single day between set times, so that experienced developers and QA engineers could help new volunteers to file and triage bugs via the IRC channels and mailing lists. The Bug Hunting Sessions for LibreOffice 7.0 were held on May 11 and July 6 – while the one for LibreOffice 7.1 took place on October 26.

LibreOffice 6.4

On January 29, LibreOffice 6.4 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at Collabora, CIB, Red Hat, SIL and other companies – along with volunteers – worked on many new features. For instance, a QR Code generator was added to the suite, making it easy to add QR codes (which can be read by mobile devices) to documents.

Hyperlink context menus were unified throughout the software to provide the following menu entries: Open Hyperlink, Edit Hyperlink, Copy Hyperlink Location and Remove Hyperlink.

Meanwhile, a new Automatic Redaction feature was added to hide classified or sensitive data in a document, based on text or regular expression matches, while the help system was reworked to provide faster and more precise search results – and many help pages were given localized screenshots for a better user experience.

TDF produced a video to explain and demonstrate many of the new features in LibreOffice 6.4. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release:

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LibreOffice 7.0

Later in the year, on August 5, TDF released LibreOffice 7.0. OpenDocument, LibreOffice’s native open and standardised format for office documents, was updated to version 1.3 as an OASIS Technical Committee Specification. Important new features included digital signatures and OpenPGP-based encryption of XML documents, with improvements in areas such as change tracking, and additional details in the description of elements in first pages, text, numbers and charts. The development of ODF 1.3’s features was funded by donations to The Document Foundation, and the implementation was done by CIB and other developers in the ecosystem.

Additionally, support for Skia graphics engine was added thanks to sponsorship by AMD, and was set as the default on Windows, for faster performance. Skia is an open source 2D graphics library which provides common APIs that work across a variety of hardware and software platforms, and can be used for drawing text, shapes and images. Vulkan is a new-generation graphics and compute API with high-efficiency and cross-platform access to modern GPUs. Luboš Luňák (Collabora) did a large part of the work to support Skia.

Many other features were added as well, and there were a large number of compatibility improvements.

As with the previous release, TDF staff worked with the LibreOffice community to make a video (PeerTube version here) 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!

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