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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

Custom Shape Tutorial

Have you ever tried to draw special and complex shapes beyond the basic offerings of LibreOffice? A custom shape of the Fibonacci spiral defined by its equation and properties with handles to reshape size? Thanks to Regina Henschel, now you have a tutorial for drawing custom shapes of your own and use them in LibreOffice.

Currently, LibreOffice provides a lot of predefined custom shapes. They are grouped to the sets ‘Basic Shapes’, ‘Block Arrows’, ‘Symbol Shapes’, ‘Stars and Banners’, ‘Callouts’, and ‘Flowchart’. And all shapes from the ‘Fontwork Gallery’ are custom shapes too. But you can do more, much more.

Custom Shapes Tutorial

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Videos from FOSDEM ’22 – LibreOffice Technology devroom – now available

FOSDEM is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development – and one of the biggest such events of its kind. This year, it took place online again, due to the pandemic.

Many LibreOffice community volunteers and certified developers gave talks at the conference, and now the videos are available for all to see! So if you want to learn more about LibreOffice technology, open standards and community activities, click the link below and enjoy.

Explore the talks and watch the videos

OpenOffice users: Getting messages about documents being made in a newer version?

Many OpenOffice users are seeing warnings when trying to access files in the OpenDocument Format (eg .odt, .ods). The full text is:

This document was created by a newer version of OpenOffice. It may contain features not supported by your current version.

In this case, the document was probably made in LibreOffice, which supports newer versions of the OpenDocument Format. LibreOffice is a successor project to OpenOffice that’s much more actively developed, with new major releases every six months, hugely improved Microsoft Office compatibility, and many other benefits:

LibreOffice supports OpenDocument Format 1.3, the latest release. COSM, the Community of ODF Specification Maintainers, is an independent project started by The Document Foundation, and oversees the work of preparing the new standards for ratification. COSM is starting to crowdfund work on the OpenDocument 1.4 standard – so organisations that would like to contribute should get in touch!

Another benefit of OpenDocument is its backwards compatibility. Even when a file is built around a newer format, older versions of the software should still be able to read and process it. So you’re not forced onto an upgrade treadmill (although as LibreOffice is free and open source software, it’s always good to keep up-to-date!)

Learn more about LibreOffice and OpenDocument here.

LibreOffice at FOSDEM 2022 – February 5-6

FOSDEM is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development – and one of the biggest such events of its kind. Normally it takes place in Brussels, but due to the pandemic, it’ll be online this year.

And the LibreOffice community will be there! We’ll have 25 talks about the technology behind the suite, open standards, and other topics.

See a full list of the talks here, and join us!

Press Releases

LibreOffice 26.2 is here: a faster, more polished office suite that you control

We’re pleased to announce the release of LibreOffice 26.2, the newest version of the free and open source office suite…

  • Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.4

    Berlin, 18 December 2025 – LibreOffice 25.8.4, the fourth minor update to the free office suite developed by volunteers for…

  • Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.3

    Berlin, 13 November 2025 - LibreOffice 25.8.3, the third minor release of the free, volunteer-supported office suite for personal productivity…

Open Document Format

The philosophy behind ODF: openness, freedom and control

File formats are not usually the subject of philosophical debate because most users just want to open, save and share…