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Meet the LibreOffice project at FOSDEM in Brussels!

Designing with LibreOffice

front-cover-web-200x300Bruce Byfield, a journalist who specializes in writing about free and open source software, has recently released Designing with LibreOffice, a book about our beloved free office suite, which is not the usual death march through the menu and standard tasks. Instead, the book takes two fresh approaches to the world’s most popular free office suite.

First, it explains the importance of using styles and templates in order to use LibreOffice with the most convenience and the least effort. Second, it explains the basics of modern design and how to apply them in LibreOffice, expanding on the open secret that LibreOffice is as much a desktop publishing application as an office suite.

The result of these approaches is a unique overview of using LibreOffice. If you are a new user, the book will help you get up to speed with LibreOffice. If you have already used LibreOffice, then this book will leave you with a clearer overview of the program and its capabilities.

Designing with LibreOffice has been published by Friends of OpenDocument under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Readers do not need to ask for permission to copy, share, or re-use the contents of Designing with LibreOffice. However, the publisher would appreciate hearing how and where the material has been re-used.

Designing with LibreOffice has a website, with additional information about the book and the author. Of course, the book can be downloaded from the website, and purchased as a traditional paper book from the the Friends of OpenDocument store on Lulu.

LibreOffice at CeBIT 2016: wrapping up

Last week LibreOffice was present at CeBIT, and it was a good opportunity to meet users, listen to their suggestions, and talk about the future of the project. Our stand in hall 3 was well-staffed by The Document Foundation team and members of the German LibreOffice community.

CeBIT focuses primarily on IT in business, so we had a lot of inquiries about large-scale migrations to LibreOffice and what can be done to make them as smooth as possible. Our flyers about LibreOffice in the enterprise helped here, but it was also good to speak face-to-face with IT managers who are considering LibreOffice, pointing them to the many successful migrations that have taken place in recent years.

But it wasn’t all about big business. Our stand received lots of visits from people who use LibreOffice at home or in other places such as churches and mailing rooms. It’s fascinating to see how the software is being used in so many different scenarios. Many visitors to our stand simply wanted to say thank you for working on LibreOffice – but of course, we were just a tiny sample of the wider LibreOffice community, so we’d like to pass on those thanks to everyone who has contributed to the suite!

And, of course, we had lots of merchandise to give away. Our sweets and stickers were especially popular, with some visitors asking for handfuls of the latter to adorn every computer and gadget they own. Thanks to everyone who visited us!

TDF and LibreOffice at CeBIT 2016

CeBIT, the world’s largest computer expo, is just around the corner. CeBIT 2016 will take place as usual at the Messegelände in Hannover, from Monday 14th to Friday 18th of March – and the LibreOffice community will be there. So if you’re attending the event, come by and say hello! We will have a stand (D30) in Hall 3, and many of us from The Document Foundation will be present along with other LibreOffice users, developers and supporters.

CeBIT is a great opportunity for us to spread the word about LibreOffice and open document formats. We’ll be explaining how the software is developed, talking about what’s new in the foundation, and (hopefully) encouraging new developers to get involved with open source projects. With over 300,000 people expected to attend over the week, we’ll be very busy.

So we hope to see you there – have a chat, pick up a leaflet, and maybe even buy a T-shirt to support LibreOffice. And when you’ve talked to us, why not post the image above (large version here) on your Twitter account or blog to let others know that we’re here!

LibreOffice 5.1.1 released

Screenshot from 2016-03-05 17:29:31Berlin, March 10, 2016 – The Document Foundation (TDF) releases LibreOffice 5.1.1, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 5.1 family, with a number of fixes over the major release announced on February 10. LibreOffice 5.1.1 offers a long awaited feature in Writer – the first request dates back to 2002 – as it allows hiding the white space between pages to provide a continuous flow of text. This feature is extremely useful on laptops.

LibreOffice 5.1.1 is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users. For more conservative users, and for enterprise deployments, TDF suggests the “still” version: LibreOffice 5.0.5. For enterprise deployments, The Document Foundation suggests the backing of professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).

People interested in technical details about the release can access the change log here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.1.1/RC1 (fixed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/5.1.1/RC3 (fixed in RC3). RC2 has not been released.

Download LibreOffice

LibreOffice 5.1.1 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.

Screenshot from 2016-03-05 17:27:13Screenshot from 2016-03-05 17:30:08Screenshot from 2016-03-05 17:29:31

LibreOffice documentation, help and beyond

olivier-cheToday, I’d like to talk about what is going on at the LibreOffice documentation project. My name is Olivier Hallot and I am a French national living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, since my infancy. Back in 2002, I got involved in the OOo project leading the software translation team for Brazilian Portuguese. My background includes being an executive in two of the major software companies before going on my own and joining the open source community.

The LibreOffice software needs improvements on the documentation process for new features as well as updates or improvements of help contents. This situation has raised my attention, because acceptance in business environments and the quality for the end user can be heavily improved with proper documentation and help.

My presentation at the LibreOffice Conference in Aarhus, in Denmark, was intended to raise the attention of the developers and the community at large, and at the end of 2015, TDF decided to invest into improving the situation of our documentation project.

So here we are, with the challenge to work in many directions:

  • get the help content updated and modernized, using a state of the art technology for 2016 and beyond;
  • coordinate the literature produced by LibreOffice volunteers, and maintain a set of updated reference book that can be translated to as many languages as possible;
  • implement the necessary tooling to make the work of documenting LibreOffice new features the most exciting, for both developers and documentation volunteers.

Of course, all these tasks have to be carried out in a coordinated way with TDF’s mission and objectives.

Working for a Brazilian company, in the future I’ll be supporting the LibreOffice community at large to improve the documentation, and to make it easily accessible to all users. Feel free to poke me on TDF mailing lists as well as on IRC channels in freenode, where I will pop up as ohallot.

Happy documenting!

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

Why OOXML is not a standard format for office documents

Unfortunately, I keep reading about open-source software advocates who happily use Microsoft's proprietary DOCX, XLSX and PPTX formats for their…