Recent Posts

LibreOffice project and community recap: December 2025

The importance of ODF during the festive season

LibreOffice Viewer now available on Meta Quest VR headsets

The Role of ODF in the Era of Digital Identity and Authentication

Announcement of LibreOffice 25.8.4

Czech translation of LibreOffice Draw Guide 25.8

Find a LibreOffice community member near you!

Hundreds of people around the world contribute to each new version of LibreOffice, and we’ve interviewed many of them on this blog. Now we’ve collected them together on a map (thanks to OpenStreetMap), so you can see who’s near you, and find out more! Click the image to see the live map:

Don’t see anyone near you? Help us to create a new native language community in your country! (Or if you’re already active in the project and would like to be interviewed, just drop us a line.)

Let’s celebrate “I love Free Software Day”!

One of our goals in the LibreOffice community is to make powerful productivity tools available to everyone. Releasing the software for free is an important part of that, but “free software” is about more than just the price. It’s about giving users fundamental freedoms in how they use their software and computers – giving control back to them.

For instance, the source code for LibreOffice – that is, the human-readable “recipe” behind the program – is available for everyone to see, study and modify. You can download this code, see what it does, change it for your needs, and then turn it back into an executable version for your computer. Many hundreds of people have done this already, contributing back important changes and updates to LibreOffice. And then you’re free to share the changes with other users.

In contrast, most other office suites don’t give users these freedoms; they are “closed”, so users can’t look under the hood, can’t study how they work, can’t make changes, and can’t share the software. Users become restricted and trapped, controlled by and locked into specific software from a specific company. That’s the very opposite of freedom!

So we’re different. But LibreOffice is just one example of free software. There are many other well-known programs, such as the Firefox web browser, and GNU/Linux operating system. The Free Software Foundation Europe is helping to spread the word about freedom, and has a number of campaigns to this end.

So we’re happy to support them on this day – and you can help them too! Use the hashtag #ilovefs on social media, talk about why free software is important to you, and let’s help people to get back control over their digital lives.

Announcing the dates of LibOCon Almeria

LibreOffice Conference 2019 will be hosted by the Spanish city of Almeria during the month of September, from September 11 (Wednesday) to September 13 (Friday).

On Tuesday, September 10, there will be the usual meetings of the community, to discuss topics of general interest for native language projects, such as localization, documentation, quality assurance, design and marketing.

Collateral events such as the social dinner and the hackfest, which are a tradition of the LibreOffice Schedule, have not yet been scheduled.

If you want to be regularly updated about LibOCon Almeria you can subscribe to the LibOCon Discussions Telegram group or the LibOCon Announcements Telegram channel.

(Image credit: José Juan Sánchez, CC-BY-SA, Wikimedia Commons)

Next C++ workshop: Recursion (14 February at 19:00 UTC)

Improve your C++ skills with the help of LibreOffice developers! We’re running regular workshops which focus on a specific topic, and are accompanied by a real-time IRC meeting. For the next one, the topics is recursion. Start by watching this presentation:

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Then join us on 14 February, 2019 at 19:00 UTC for a discussion via our #libreoffice-dev IRC channel on Freenode. You can ask experienced LibreOffice developers questions, and learn more about the language. See you then!

Community Member Monday: Khaled Hosny

With LibreOffice 6.2 now available, we return to our regular chats with LibreOffice community members! Today we’re talking to Khaled Hosny, who is working on the software’s font handling and user interface…

To start with, tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m based in Cairo, Egypt. I use IRC but not very actively – my nick is KhaledHosny. I’m a bit active on Twitter as well. I’m also on GitHub (which, after all, is a social network of sorts): https://github.com/khaledhosny.

Outside of my work on LibreOffice, I’m also a localizer and typeface designer, both in a professional capacity and as a hobby. I’m also an avid reader, and an amateur calligrapher and artist.

Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?

I contribute in my spare time mostly, but some of my work was sponsored by The Document Foundation.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

I was trying to fix some bugs with Arabic text layout in OpenOffice.org (the predecessor to LibreOffice) on Linux. It wasn’t the most pleasant experience, to say the least, and I never got to finish the fix I was working on. So, when I became aware of LibreOffice in early 2011, I switched immediately and was able to finish and submit my first patch, which got reviewed and accepted. I have been contributing to LibreOffice intermittently since then.

What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?

I’m mostly interested in areas of text layout and font handling, especially for Arabic and other writing systems that require advanced text layout. I also sometimes work on UI issues affecting right-to-left writing systems, as well as layout of mathematical equations.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

That was over eight years ago, so my memory is fading away, but I remember that it was much better than working on OpenOffice.org, and the build system (even then) was much more pleasant to use. Also, I think my first patch was accepted without much friction and delay, which is not my experience with many other open source projects.

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

In my humble opinion, I think the project needs a clearer vision and development agenda. Right now things seem to be moving organically without much coordination, and every one is working on whatever interests them. I understand that such development organisation is not easy or even feasible in an open source development model and might not even be desirable, but maybe The Document Foundation should take a more active role in steering LibreOffice development.

Thanks to Khaled for his time, and contributions to LibreOffice! Our community would benefit from more help in translating the website and user interface into Arabic, so if you’re interested, start here!

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.2 with NotebookBar, the office suite which offers the most flexible user experience

LibreOffice 6.1.5 also released, for enterprise class deployments and mainstream users looking for robust productivity

Berlin, February 7, 2019 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.2 with NotebookBar, a significant major release of the free office suite which features a radical new approach to the user interface – based on the MUFFIN concept [1] – and provides user experience options capable of satisfying all users’ preferences, while leveraging all screen sizes in the best way.

The NotebookBar is available in Tabbed, Grouped and Contextual flavors, each one with a different approach to the menu layout, and complements the traditional Toolbars and Sidebar. The Tabbed variant aims to provide a familiar interface for users coming from proprietary office suites and is supposed to be used primarily without the sidebar, while the Grouped one allows to access “first-level” functions with one click and “second-level” functions with a maximum of two clicks.

The design community has also made substantial changes and improvements to icon themes, in particular Elementary and Karasa Jaga.

LibreOffice 6.2 new and improved features:

  • The help system offers faster filtering of index keywords, highlighting search terms as they are typed and displaying results based on the selected module.
  • Context menus have been tidied up, to be more consistent across the different components in the suite.
  • Change tracking performances have been dramatically improved, especially in large documents.
  • In Writer, it is now possible to copy spreadsheet data into tables instead of just inserting them as objects.
  • In Calc, it is now possible to do multivariate regression analysis using the regression tool. In addition, many more statistical measures are now available in the analysis output, and the new REGEX function has been added, to match text against a regular expression and optionally replace it.
  • In Impress & Draw, the motion path of animations can now be modified by dragging its control points. In addition, a couple of text-related drawing styles have been added, as well as a Format Table submenu in Draw.
  • LibreOffice Online, the cloud-based version of the suite, includes many improvements too. On mobile devices, the user interface has been simplified, with better responsiveness and updates to the on-screen keyboard.

Interoperability with proprietary file formats has also been improved, as with every major and minor version of LibreOffice, for better compatibility with Office documents, including old versions which have been deprecated by Microsoft. The focus has been on charts and animations, and on document security features, with agile encryption and HMAC verification.

LibreOffice 6.2’s new features have been developed by a large community of code contributors: 74% of commits are from developers employed by companies sitting in the Advisory Board like Collabora, Red Hat and CIB and by other contributors such as the City of Munich and SIL, and 26% are from individual volunteers.

In addition, there is a global community of individual volunteers taking care of other fundamental activities such as quality assurance, software localization, user interface design and user experience, editing of help system and documentation, plus free software and open document standards advocacy at a local level.

A video summarizing the top new features of LibreOffice 6.2 is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HUnR5IoAQk.

LibreOffice 6.1.5 for enterprise class deployments

The Document Foundation has also released LibreOffice 6.1.5, a more mature version which includes some months of back-ported fixes and is better suited for enterprise class deployments, where features are less important than robustness as the main objective is individual productivity.

Enterprises willing to deploy LibreOffice on a professional basis should source value-added services – related to software support, migrations and training – from certified people (https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/) and a LibreOffice LTS (Long Term Supported) versions provided by one of the companies sitting on TDF Advisory Board (https://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/).

Sourcing enterprise class software and/or services from the ecosystem of certified professionals are the best support options for organizations deploying LibreOffice on a large number of desktops. In fact, these activities are contributed back to the project under the form of improvements to the software and the community, and trigger a virtuous circle which is beneficial to all parties, including users.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.2 and LibreOffice 6.1.5

LibreOffice 6.2 and LibreOffice 6.1.5 are immediately available from the following web page: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are also available, released as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/.

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server service, and should be installed and configured by adding cloud storage and an SSL certificate. It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud services offered by ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

LibreOffice 6.2 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

Press Kit

The press kit is here: https://tdf.io/lo62presskit.

[1] https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2016/12/21/the-document-foundation-announces-the-muffin-a-new-tasty-user-interface-concept-for-libreoffice/

Press Releases

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…

Open Document Format

The importance of ODF during the festive season

To be honest, I didn't think I would publish my usual post about ODF over the festive period, as most…