TDF Community Blog

LibreOffice 5.3: A week in stats

2017-02-092017-02-09

We announced LibreOffice 5.3 one week ago, and a lot has happened in the meantime! Here’s a summary of downloads, web page views, social media activity and other statistics. We’ve also compared these to the LibreOffice 5.2 first week stats to see how the project and community is progressing…

410,472 downloads of LibreOffice 5.3

This is a 32% increase over the first week of LibreOffice 5.2 – and note that it only includes downloads from our servers and mirrors, and not other sources (such as Linux distribution package repositories).

378,719 unique visitors to our website

Here we have a major 77% increase over the same period for the last release. In addition, there were 834,959 page views.

3,293 donations to The Document Foundation

Donations help our project and community in many ways – infrastructure, documentation, events, marketing, and more. Compared to the first week of LibreOffice 5.2, the number of donations increased by 79%.

77,878 views of our New Features videos

More big growth here – the videos for LibreOffice 5.2 had 37,252 views in comparison, so this is a 109% increase. A lot of this growth can be attributed to the many news articles on the web that embedded the videos for readers to watch.

Now, how about social media?

30,298 people reached by the announcement on Facebook

Our Facebook community is growing steadily, and here we see a 21% increase over the same statistic for LibreOffice 5.2. The announcement was liked by 851 people and shared 213 times. Meanwhile, our Google+ post received 229 likes (up from 115 for the previous version).

So there’s plenty to be happy about, but there are some areas where we can improve as well:

20,203 impressions from the announcement tweet

This is a 42% decrease compared to the tweet for LibreOffice 5.2. There are many possible reasons for this decrease, some out of our control, but we’ll revise our strategy for the next release to ensure that the Twittersphere keeps talking about us. Similarly, Reddit activity around the release wasn’t quite as strong this time: links to the LibreOffice 5.3 announcement on the blog received 486 upvotes, compared to 632 for last time, so that’s something to work on as well.

But on the whole, we can see that the project and community is growing well. Thanks to everyone who helped out with marketing, promotion and social media activity around the release!

Download LibreOffice 5.3 here

The Document Foundation announces feature-rich LibreOffice 5.3

2017-02-012017-02-01

Berlin, February 1st, 2017 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.3, one of the most feature-rich releases in the history of the application. The office suite is immediately available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and for the first time also for the private cloud.

LibreOffice 5.3 represents a significant step forward in the evolution of the software: it offers an introduction to new features such as online with collaborative editing, which increase the competitive positioning of the application, and at the same time provides incremental improvements, to make the program more reliable, interoperable and user-friendly.

“LibreOffice is backed by a fantastic community of developers”, says Michael Meeks, a member of the board of The Document Foundation. “In 2010, only a few people were betting on our capability of attracting a large number of code contributors, which are instrumental for the success of a large code base. In six years we have attracted over 1,100 new developers and, thanks to this large community, during the last two years we have had an average of 300 people active on the source code”.

LibreOffice 5.3 highlights

LibreOffice 5.3 offers a number of interesting new features in every area: a new cross-platform text layout engine that uses HarfBuzz for consistent text layout on all platforms, with significant advantages across languages and alphabets; a revised Help menu, with new quick links to user guides and community support forums, for an improved user experience; and better import/export filters to new and legacy MS Office documents.

Writer now supports Table Styles, for applying formatting to a table which is preserved when you make edits to it; a new Page Deck in the sidebar lets the user quickly customise page settings without having to go through a separate dialog box; and a new Go to Page Box makes it possible to jump to another page in the document with just a few keystrokes.

Calc provides a new set of default cell styles, with greater variety and better names than in previous releases; in fresh installations, “Enable wildcards in formulas” is now the default option, rather than regular expressions, to improve compatibility with other spreadsheet software; and a new text entry box lets the user narrow down the functions he is looking for, and simplifies the search for the right one.

Impress now opens with a template selector, to get the user off to a quick start; and a new Slide Properties Deck is now available in the sidebar while in slide master mode.

A list of the most significant new features is available in a separate document (http://tdf.io/lo53features) and is presented in a series of short videos (http://tdf.io/53vids). A page with the top new features is also available on the website at http://www.libreoffice.org/discover/new-features/.

LibreOffice 5.3 has also been improved “under the hood,” thanks to the work of hundreds of volunteers. This translates into an open source office suite which is easier to develop, maintain and debug. Although this is not visible to users, it is extremely important for enterprise deployments.

LibreOffice is deployed by large organizations in every continent. A list of the most significant migrations announced in the media is available here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/LibreOffice_Migrations.

LibreOffice Online

LibreOffice 5.3 features the first source release of LibreOffice Online, a cloud office suite which provides basic collaborative editing of documents in a browser by re-using the LibreOffice “core engine”. Rendering fidelity is excellent, and interoperability matches that of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server service and should be installed and configured by adding a cloud storage and an SSL certificate, which are not included in the solution. It might be considered an enabling technology for the public cloud of ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations.

Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/.

A background document providing the positioning of LibreOffice Online is available here: http://tdf.io/loonlineback.

Experimental UI features

Starting from the 5.3 family, LibreOffice UI has been extended with the addition of an experimental Notebookbar, which offers another UI option in addition to the Default UI (with two toolbars), the Single Toolbar UI and the Sidebar with a Single Toolbar. Each UI layout has been thought to serve a different cluster of LibreOffice users.

LibreOffice UI is code named MUFFIN, an acronym for My User-Friendly & Flexible INterface. A background document explaining the UI concept is available here: http://tdf.io/muffinback.

Availability and enterprise deployments

LibreOffice 5.3 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users.

For enterprise class deployments, TDF maintains the more mature 5.2.5 version, which should be supported by certified professionals according to best practices recognized worldwide (http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

LibreOffice 5.3 is immediately available from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice users, free software advocates, and all community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org.

Press Kit and Screenshots

The press kit, with background documents and high-resolution images, can be downloaded from http://tdf.io/lo53presskit. Screenshots can be downloaded from http://tdf.io/lo53screenshots.

Announcement of LibreOffice 5.2.5

2017-01-262017-01-26

Berlin, January 26, 2017 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 5.2.5 “still”, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family. Based on the upcoming announcement of LibreOffice 5.3, all users are invited to update to LibreOffice 5.2.5 from LibreOffice 5.1.6 or previous versions.

TDF suggests deploying LibreOffice in large organizations, public administrations and enterprises with the backing of professional support by certified people (a list is available at http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

Road to LibreOffice 5.3

LibreOffice 5.3 will be announced in less than a week, on February 1st, 2017. Users can start learning about the new features on LibreOffice 5.3 Release Notes page (https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/5.3).

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.2.5 is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/. LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org.

Several companies sitting in TDF Advisory Board (http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/advisory-board/) are providing either value added Long Term Supported versions of LibreOffice or consultancy services for migrations and training, based on best practices distilled by The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice contributor interview: Tamás Bunth

2017-01-242017-01-24

LibreOffice developers, testers, translators and documentation authors are working hard on LibreOffice 5.3, which is due for release in early February. One contributor to the project, Tamás Bunth, has been helping to improve Base, the database front-end of the suite. We caught up with him to ask how he got involved with LibreOffice and what the community is like…

Where do you live, and are you active on IRC channels or social media?

I’m Hungarian, and I live in Budapest. My IRC nickname is Wastack (the name comes from the game Heroes of Might and Magic, one of my favourite games from childhood – Wastack is a barbarian hero). I’m on Facebook too: https://www.facebook.com/btomi96.

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

I did some work for Libreoffice as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student last year. In the future I’ll contribute in my spare time.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

One of my roommates in my student hostel suggested that we should try GSoC. I was searching for an end user application written in Java or C++, since these are the languages I’m comfortable with. As I looked at the Easy Hacks I realised that I may be able to solve some of these, and the developer community was helpful as well.

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

My GSoC project was to upgrade the internal Firebird database management system, which is used by LibreOffice Base, and solve related bugs, which makes Firebird an experimental feature. Therefore, I got to know the drivers in some detail, and I think I’ll stick to this area in the future.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

When I first looked at the C++ code in the repository, it was scary, since even a simple string is called OUString. After that I found some UNO interfaces, and I really don’t know what was going on there. Of course, after some time and guidance from my mentor things got much clearer.

Which is your preferred text editor – and why?

Vim is my favourite. Well, I don’t now many other editors, but Vim is highly customisable. I like the recording feature too.

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

I am a 2nd year Bachelor of Science student of Budapest University of Technology and Economics. In my free time I go rowing. This year I got 4th place on the National Championship of Hungary in eights crew. I’ve achieved two first places there, but I’ve never been in an international race. It is one of my future goals.

Any other hobbies or projects you’re working on?

When I still have some free time, I like writing little computer games. I started with a simple snake game using Flash several years ago, which was followed by a Tetris with Java Swing and a multiplayer Tron game using TCP (still Java). Currently, I have an incomplete project of a browser game, where you have to move simultaneously with figures on a map. It is written in JavaScript, with Node.js on the server side.

Thanks Tamás! And thanks to everyone else who’s working on making LibreOffice 5.3 the best release yet. If you’re reading this and want to join a friendly and busy community promoting open standards and document liberation, get involved!

Marketing & PR at TDF in the second half of 2016

2017-01-112017-01-11

In terms of marketing and PR, a large free software project is quite similar to a large corporation. In fact, activities are following each other without interruption: major and minor product announcements, global events and local events, community fostering projects, and day to day activities (such as working with journalists).

In addition, there are the so called back office activities, which are instrumental for the success of the main ones but are less visible (and usually tedious). For instance, a major announcement has a burst of PR activities during the last week, which are based on a careful check of journalists’ email addresses, and on a thorough read of articles published during the last few months.

July is the month of a major announcement, which happens either at the end of July or during the first week of August. In 2016, we have announced LibreOffice 5.2, a feature rich major release, introducing – amongst a wealth of interesting novelties – document classification, a significant new feature for enterprise deployments.

August is usually the month before the LibreOffice Conference, and as such is spent finalizing the event schedule, and putting the finishing touches to the program.

September is the conference month. In 2016, the community has gathered in Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic and a technology hub, at the local IT university. The event was organized by OpenAlt and backed by Red Hat, which has a large software dev facility in the city. During the conference, we have announced LibreOffice 5.2.1 and LibreOffice 5.1.5.

October is usually the month when we start planning the next major announcement. In 2016 we have worked together with the Design Team at the new user interface concept, which will be affecting not only LibreOffice 5.3 but also the following major release, and possibly even the next one.

We have discussed extensively the concept, because we wanted to provide users a clear path forward without leaving behind those loyal to the traditional LibreOffice UI, which will not be abandoned.

LibreOffice will offer a flexible user interface, where each user will be able to configure the UI to fit his working habits. In fact, with millions of users, it would be impossible to please everyone by offering only one option in term of user interface.

In November, during the Month of LibreOffice, we have prepared the UI announcement, while working at media mailing lists and monitoring articles about LibreOffice 5.2 (which have reached the record amount of over 2,000 in less than six months).

We have also improved the results, in terms of clicks, of our Google sponsored AdWord account. This is a fine tuning activity, based on the mix of keywords and the bid value associated to each keyword.

In December, we have announced the MUFFIN – My User Friendly & Flexible Interface – with a record number of over 20,000 visits (and over 80,000 page views) to TDF blog. It is an unexpected success, which confirms that we have chosen the right approach to an issue affecting a large number of LibreOffice users.

At the end of the semester, we are ready for a new exciting year (and another semester of ongoing marketing and PR activities, which will start in early January with the first draft of the documents for the announcement of LibreOffice 5.3).

Happy 2017

LibreOffice contributor interview: Hazel Russman

2017-01-102017-01-10

A new year begins, and we kick off with our first LibreOffice contributor interview of 2017. This time we’re talking to Hazel Russman who helps out with documentation and translations…

Where do you live, and are you active on social media?

I’m British and live in North London. I don’t do social media but I have a web page at www.hrussman.entadsl.com.

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

I’m retired. I help out the documentation team mainly as a translator and proofreader.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

I wrote a novel some years ago and used OpenOffice.org to get it into shape for self-publishing. I wanted to give something back, and the OOo site suggested that time might be more valuable than money. When LibreOffice forked off, I moved over to their team.

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

I’ve done quite a bit of translation from German into English, especially for Base, which has an excellent German handbook. Until I translated it, there was hardly anything on Base in English. English is my native language, but I grew up in a German-speaking home. My parents were refugees from Hitler. I’m also quite well known on the team as a proofreader.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?

Interesting and very satisfying. But I’ve never been much interested in socialising online.

Which is your preferred text editor, and why?

For plain text, I like gVim. It has all the Vim keyboard commands but also graphical controls. The best of both worlds, you might say. I do a bit of coding in my spare time and for that I use Geany. Both Vim and Geany do syntax checking, which is a great help.

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?

Lots of things! I have a dog who takes up a lot of my time. I am active in my local church and play the cello as part of an instrumental group attached to the church’s gospel choir. I am also quite active on Linux Questions, which is the only social networking that I can be bothered with.

Thanks Hazel! We’ll be posting more interviews over the coming weeks and months, so if you want to join the LibreOffice community, pop over to tdf.io/joinus and choose how you want to get involved. We look forward to your input and contributions!

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