On June 10, LibreOffice 7.1.4 Community was made available for download, with 80 bugfixes and compatibility improvements. Thanks as always to our volunteers and certified developers for their work on it!
Hossein Nourikhah joined the TDF team as Developer Community Architect. He’ll help to onboard new developers in the project, give them code pointers, and assist them as they add new features. Welcome, Hossein!
Meanwhile, ODF 1.3 was announced as an OASIS standard. ODF (OpenDocument Format) is the native format of LibreOffice, and is a fully open standard that other productivity tools can implement.
The LibreOffice Conference 2021 is coming up in September – and you can design the logo for it! Here’s the one from 2020 (the joint conference organised with the openSUSE project) for inspiration…
LibreOffice’s Japanese community reported from their Kaigi 2021 Online event. Speakers from around Japan (and Asia) talked about their work and projects. Hopefully in-person events will be possible soon!
Companies in the LibreOffice ecosystem contribute valuable things to the project: new features, bugfixes, and long-term support options for enterprise users. At the end of the month, German company allotropia announced that it has joined TDF’s Advisory Board – it provides services, consulting and products around LibreOffice and related open source projects.
Daniel A. Rodriguez from the Hispanic LibreOffice community (and TDF’s Board of Directors) writes:
On Saturday June 26, we held the first virtual meeting of the Hispanic community this year. The activity was attended by several members, who are recognized for their participation and collaboration in the project.
We have opted for a new name for the event, although the same spirit as last year has been maintained. We understand that this modification is in line with what we do every day in the different areas we set up for this purpose: talk about LibreOffice.
In addition, we launched the Spanish channel on Fediverse.tv and the #libreoffice-es room on Libera.Chat. The interaction with the speakers was available through the integrated chat on Fediverse.tv, IRC (either with a client or through the web interface), or from the Hispanic group on Telegram.
As always, it was an open activity, free of charge and aimed at anyone interested in the office suite par excellence of free software. The event could be attended live from 16:00 UTC through the Spanish channel on Fediverse.tv.
Almost immediately after each presentation, the video was made available through the chosen platform. Fediverse.tv is based on PeerTube, which is an open source, decentralized, federated web application that uses peer-to-peer technology to reduce the load on individual servers when viewing videos.
I am a son and grandson of American missionaries who moved to Brazil in 1952. Since my mother was born here (my father was a seven month old baby), I was born automatically a Brazilian citizen – even though I was born in the USA. Being brought up in Brazil, I learned both American English in the home, and learned Brazilian Portuguese in parallel. I am fluent in both languages. Computers came into my life as my dad saw the importance and value of them in the eighties. Watching him hack an Apple IIe and a daisy wheel printer to get the tilde accent over the letter “y” was an adventure in and of itself.
I have been on a learning journey for most of my life. Everything I have learned is self-taught, including LibreOffice. My main activity in life is teaching in general. Teaching software to newbies such as the elderly, the underprivileged and young people is a passion I have. LibreOffice is an excellent starting point as it has virtually all the basic areas: text, images, markup languages, programming logic on a very simple scale with macros, databases etc., and much, much, more.
What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?
Right now, I am on the Brazilian translation and editing team. I am new, and am still learning how to organize myself better. The Brazilian team lead by Olivier Hallot is wonderful, fun, and at the same time, very serious about their work. Our Wednesday night meetings are in a fun and enjoyable environment – without losing the fine touch necessary for an editing team. I learn a lot from them just by listening to them.
Why did you decide to become a member of The Document Foundation?
Firstly, becoming a member of TDF is a way to begin to know other people, and, secondly, I believe becoming a member adds prestige to a curriculum vitae.
Both contact with people around the globe, and being part of something free, open and serious as TDF will open new doors for me to help “convert” people to LibreOffice, the ideals of TDF and open source software in general.
Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice really need?
There are two main things I would like to do with LibreOffice:
Create a teaching standard for IT.
Convince businesses to adopt more open standards via LibreOffice.
Participating in many different LibreOffice groups, I have noticed a major request for a change in LibreOffice’s appearance. It may seem trivial, but, many non-technical people make a decision of acceptance or rejection based on the look of something. I believe it would be wise to do an overhaul of the visuals.
Personally, I don’t pay too much attention to that since I focus on usability, but I am surrounded by people who reject many things simply because the look isn’t “modern”, “contemporary”, or “cool” enough.
I am 47 years old, so, my age may be a factor that adds into the way I interpret the visual aspects (meaning I don’t care too much about them). On the other hand, as the years go by, I notice that my way of thinking and doing things has somewhat solidified. An older generation can run the risk of not paying attention to the new generation and this generation (my children’s or younger) are a highly visual generation.
Many thanks to Tim for all his contributions! Everyone helping out in the LibreOffice project is welcome to apply for membership of TDF, and help us to steer our projects into the future 👍
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Jean Weber, Kees Kriek, Felipe Viggiano and Peter Schofield from the LibreOffice Documentation Team are happy to announce the immediate availability of the Getting Started Guide 7.1, the introductory guide for all readers that need to start using the LibreOffice suite and quickly get to the proficiency level.
Covering all LibreOffice modules, from the Calc spreadsheet to the Base database and including chapters on the suite settings as well as macro coding, the Getting Started Guide 7.1 is a valuable companion for organizations that must deploy documentation on LibreOffice together with the software suite on their offices and also at user’s home.
The Guide is available in PDF format and is part of the LibreOffice Library, a set of advanced guides for the LibreOffice productivity suite.
Berlin, July 1, 2021 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announced today that allotropia – a German company that provides services, consulting and products around LibreOffice and related open source projects – has joined TDF’s Advisory Board.
Founded in late 2020 with five long-time LibreOffice developers, allotropia’s stated mission is to bring LibreOffice to shine – in as many different shapes and forms as necessary, to serve the modern needs of office productivity software. allotropia was spun off from CIB, another long-time provider of LibreOffice-based products and services (and also a member of the Advisory Board).
allotropia joining the Advisory Board, as a new and valuable ecosystem partner for LibreOffice, is a great achievement and help for TDF. The mix of “innovation style” of a start up, as well as the staff and management – who are well known in our community for years – will bring synergy effects for both sides. We warmly welcome allotropia as a new ecosystem partner, and wish them all the best and good luck in their business activities.
Thorsten Behrens, CEO and owner of allotropia software GmbH, adds:
We are super excited to be working with the LibreOffice community in this new setup. There are many areas where innovation is needed and we are investing, for example in running LibreOffice client-side in a browser. On the other hand, with the experienced team we have here, it is a privilege to serve our existing customers and help them to run LibreOffice securely and conveniently.
About the Advisory Board
TDF’s Advisory Board’s primary function is to represent supporters of the project, and to provide the Board of Directors (BoD) with advice, guidance and proposals. In addition, the AB is at the kernel of the LibreOffice ecosystem, and as such is key to the further development of the project.
LibreOffice Conference Call for Papers has been extended until July 18, 2021. This is the final deadline, and no further extension will be offered. To facilitate the development of the conference schedule,proposals can only be submitted using TDF event management platform athttps://events.documentfoundation.org/libocon2021/cfp.
LibreOffice Conference 2021 will take place online from September 23 to 25, Thursday to Saturday. The Document Foundation invites all members and contributors to submit talks, lectures and workshops. Whether you are a seasoned presenter or have never spoken in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice, ODF, the Document Liberation Project or the ODF Toolkit, we want to hear from you!
The conference program will be based on the following tracks:
a) Development, APIs, Extensions, Future Technology
b) Quality Assurance
c) Localization, Documentation and Native Language Projects
d) Appealing Libreoffice: Ease of Use, Design and Accessibility
e) Open Document Format, Document Liberation and Interoperability
f) Advocating, Promoting, Marketing LibreOffice
g) Diversity and Inclusion, New Generation Project for Students’ Inclusion
Presentations, case studies and technical talks will discuss a subject in depth and will last 30 minutes (including Q&A), while Workshops will last 90 minutes (including Q&A). Lightning talks will cover a specific topic and will last 5 minutes (including Q&A). Sessions will be streamed live and recorded for download.
If you do not agree to provide the data for the talk under the “Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License”, please explicitly state your terms. In order to make your presentation available on TDF YouTube and PeerTube channels, please do not submit talks containing copyrighted material (music, pictures, etc.).
