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LibreOffice Technology DevRoom Call for Papers

FOSDEM 2022 will be a virtual event, taking place online on Saturday, February 5, and Sunday, February 6. The LibreOffice DevRoom is scheduled for Sunday, February 6, from 9AM to 7PM (times to be confirmed). If we will get more interesting talk proposals than the maximum number we can fit in one day, we will have the opportunity to extend the DevRoom to Saturday, February 5, in the afternoon.

NEW RULES FOR 2022

  • The reference time will be Brussels local time (CET).
  • Talks will be pre-recorded in advance, and streamed during the event
  • Q/A session will be live
  • A facility will be provided for people watching to chat between themselves
  • A facility will be provided for people watching to submit questions

IMPORTANT DATES TO REMEMBER

  • December 26: Submission deadline
  • December 28: Announcement of selected talks
  • December 31: Publication of DevRoom final schedule
  • January 16: Availability of pre-recordings for review
  • January 23: Deadline for upload of presentations

CALL FOR PAPERS

We are inviting proposals for talks about LibreOffice Technology, including ODF standard document format, on topics such as code, localization, QA, UX, documentation, tools, extensions, migrations and general advocacy. Please keep in mind that product pitches are not allowed at FOSDEM.

The length of talks is limited to a maximum of 25 minutes, as we would like to have some minutes for questions after each presentation, and to fit as many presenters as possible in the schedule. Exceptions must be explicitly requested and justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you have requested.

IMPORTANT INFORMATIONS

  • Presentations have to be pre-recorded and tested for streaming before the event.
  • Once your talk is pre-recorded, and approved by a reviewer in term of quality for streaming, it will have to be uploaded by January 23, to be prepared and ready for broadcast (the deadline cannot be moved further).
  • During the stream of talks, speakers must be available online for the Q/A session.

TALK SUBMISSIONS

All talk submissions have to be made in the Pentabarf event planning tool: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM22.

While filing the proposal, please provide the title of your talk, a short abstract (one or two paragraphs), some information about yourself (name, bio and photo, but please do remember that your profile might be already stored in Pentabarf). To submit your talk, click on “Create Event” and select the “LibreOffice Technology” DevRoom as the “Track”. Otherwise, your talk will not be even considered for any devroom at all.

If you already have a Pentabarf account from a previous year, even if your talk was not accepted, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year. If you have any issues with Pentabarf, please get in touch with the DevRoom manager.

DEVROOM MANAGER

Italo Vignoli: italo@libreoffice.org

Nine more videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2021

Here are some more videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2021! Check out the playlist, using the button in the top-right – or scroll down for links to individual videos:

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There are just a few videos remaining – we’ll post them very soon!

LibreOffice extension to remove blank cells – Help to improve it!

Rafael Lima from the Brazilian LibreOffice community is working on an extension to remove blank cells in LibreOffice Calc. It has four modes (single column, single row, blank rows and blank columns). Here’s a quick animation of it in action:

So far, the main functionality is there, but Rafael would like to improve it. We asked him for some more info…

What does the extension do?

The main purpose of this extension is to remove blank cells to easily compact data. For instance, suppose you have a table with data and then you delete the contents of some rows. The next thing you might want to do is remove these blank rows to compact your table. By using the Remove Blank Cells extension this can be done with a single click.

Currently the extension supports four modes to remove blank cells. The simplest one is when you select a single row or column, then the extension will detect the selection and compact the data removing all blank cells. However, if a matrix is selected, then a message will be displayed and you can choose if blank rows or blank columns are to be removed.

When did you start making it?

I started writing the extension in February this year and finished the first version in less than one month. Then I kept testing it and working on improvements and the final version was finished in July.

At first the extension focused on my use case, because in my work with data analysis I often have to remove blank rows and columns. However, after seeing many people asking about how to remove blank cells in LibreOffice, I decided to pack it and make it available for everyone since it might be useful for other people.

What are the current limitations of it?

The main limitation of the extension is when the user wants to process very large tables (with tens of thousands of rows), which might take some time to finish. In these cases a progress bar is shown so the user can keep track of the data processing.

Moreover, the extension still does not support translations, so the user interface is only available in English. I plan to support translations in the next release.

How can people help to improve it?

Because this is the first released version of the extension, I would appreciate having more people testing it and reporting issues on the extension’s GitHub page.

I would also like to invite the community to create a better icon for the extension, so that it would be more in line with the default icon theme in LibreOffice.

In the future I will also need some assistance with translating the extension’s strings.

So, everyone is welcome to try out the extension – and if you have some technical knowledge, jump in and help Rafael and the community to improve it! Check out the wiki for more information on extension development.

Ten more videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2021

Here are some more videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2021! Check out the playlist, using the button in the top-right – or scroll down for links to individual videos:

Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

Individual links

Note: many of these are also available on PeerTube, and more will be added…

Stay tuned for more videos from rooms 2 and 3 of the conference!

LibreOffice and Google Summer of Code 2021: The results

Google Summer of Code logo

This year, LibreOffice was once again a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a global program focused on bringing more student developers into free and open source software development. Seven projects were finished successfully. Students and mentors enjoyed the time, and here we present some of the achievements, which should make their way into LibreOffice 7.3 in early February 2022!

You can experiment with the new features by using daily builds and report any problems in our bug tracker.

100 Paper Cuts by Bayram Çiçek

Mentors: Muhammet Kara (Collabora), Heiko Tietze (TDF)

100 Paper Cuts aims to improve user interface, implementing enhancement requests and solving the most annoying issues on the user experience (UX) side of LibreOffice.

Bayram fixed six bugs from different topics. Most notable are border preview not showing the diagonal border option, a bug where cropping flipped images occurred at the wrong side, and mouse-over effect for different palettes in the area tab.

Learn more about 100 Paper Cuts in the final report.

Screenshot of diagonal borders

Integrate .ui dialogs with translation tooling/string search webservice to help translators by Sary Nasser

Mentors: Christian Lohmaier, Olivier Hallot (TDF)

Sary automated the adding of screenshots to our translation platform, Weblate, while associating them with translatable words. This will greatly help translators by providing context for their work.

Learn more about the translation tooling in the final report.

Tests for the VCL graphic backends by Akshit Kushwaha

Mentors: Tomaž Vajngerl, Luboš Luňák (Collabora)

LibreOffice adapts its user interface to different operating systems with the help of its graphics toolkit Visual Class Library (VCL). Thanks to Akshit’s work, we have a working suite of automated graphics rendering tests. There is now also the ability for users to run the tests manually, inspect the results and attach them to our bug tracker in case there is a problem.

Learn more about the tests in the final report.

Screenshot of VCL tests

Improving table styles by Balázs Sántha

Mentors: László Németh (independent), Michael Stahl (allotropia)

This project resulted in fixes for the most annoying Writer table style issues. Further work is needed to provide full DOCX compatibility.

Learn more about DOCX tables styles in the final report.

Make SVM (StarView Metafile) format independent of the VCL Metafile + tests of the format by Panos Korovesis

Mentors: Tomaž Vajngerl, Miklos Vajna (Collabora)

Thanks to the work of Panos, the SVM file format is handled independently of internal VCL constructs, which will make important reorganisation of the VCL code possible. Panos also created automated tests for the SVM format.

Learn more about the SVM project in the final report.

Show text styles together in the sidebar by Anshu Khare

Mentors: Mike Kaganski, Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora), Heiko Tietze (TDF)

Both paragraph as well as character styles are essential means to format text. Many users struggle with this concept and use direct formatting. Also, we don’t show both at once, and the two style families are not obvious to spot for casual users.

In order to improve the handling of styles (and as necessary preparation for the styles highlighter), Anshu started to rework the code. The new code makes it now possible to merge both lists into one view. A first patch was also part of the project – although it is not finished yet.

Implement Interface for external data source import into Calc by Tushar Kumar Rai

Mentors: Markus Mohrhard (independent), Heiko Tietze (TDF)

The data provider allows to import various data such as local CSV files or streams from external sources, and to apply transformations like adding/removing rows or columns, formatting and numerical operations with the data before it is inserted into the sheet. Plus, to update the data by still applying the transformations is just a click.

The project aimed to rework the user interface. Tushar organized the layout according the user workflow and common UI principles and made the workflow of adding/removing transformations easy to understand. He also added a couple of transformations.

Learn more about the data provider project in the final report.

Screenshot of Data Provider

Wrapping up

Many thanks to all students who spent their summer time improving LibreOffice. You are awesome! And special thanks also to the mentors who always put so much love and energy into these tasks. That’s what makes LibreOffice rock.

Now we are looking forward to next year’s GSoC. If you are interested, why not prepare early? Learn more at out wiki page where some ideas are listed.

Participating in GSoC is a great way to build your skills, and show future employers what you’re capable of!

Next batch of videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2021

Here are some more videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2021! Check out the playlist, using the button in the top-right – or scroll down for links to individual videos:

Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.

Individual links

Note: many of these are also available on PeerTube, and more will be added…

Stay tuned for more videos from rooms 2 and 3 of the conference!

Press Releases

The Document Foundation announces the simultaneous availability of LibreOffice 26.2.2 and LibreOffice 25.8.6

Berlin, 26 March 2026 – The Document Foundation today announces the simultaneous release of LibreOffice 26.2.2 and LibreOffice 25.8.6. These…

Open Document Format

Let’s put an end to the speculation

Ideally, we would have preferred to avoid this post. However, the articles and comments published in response to Collabora's and…