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LibreOffice 26.2 is here: a faster, more polished office suite that you control

Meet the LibreOffice project at FOSDEM in Brussels!

The philosophy behind ODF: openness, freedom and control

Meet the LibreOffice community at FOSDEM 2026!

State of the Project – Calendar Year 2025

Version 1 of TDF Community Bylaws

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!

March 8, Women’s Day

march8March 8 is the International Women’s Day. The theme for 2016 is “Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step It Up for Gender Equality”.

march8dayThe Document Foundation has 210 members, but only 20 are women: Belinda Dibra (Albania), Christina Roßmanith (Germany), Eliane Domingos de Sousa (Brasil), Ellen Pape (Germany), Gülşah Köse (Turkey), Irmhild Rogalla (Germany), Jacqueline Rahemipour (Germany), Jean Hollis Weber (Australia), Katarina Behrens (Czech Republic, living in Germany), Linda Martinez (Venezuela), Marina Latini (Italy), Pallavi Jadhav (India), Priyanka Gaikwad (India), Rajashri Bhat Udhoji (India), Regina Henschel (Germany), Sigrid Carrera (Germany), Sonia Montegiove (Italy), Sophie Gautier (France), Surbhi Tongia (India) and Vinaya Mandke (India).

Marina Latini has recently been elected to the Board of Directors, and is the current ChairWoman of the Board of Directors.

Women active in the LibreOffice and Document Liberation communities are definitely more than 20. They should apply for membership, not only to be recognized for their contributions, but also to elect and be elected to the Board of Directors and the Membership Committee.

They can find the application form on the website: http://www.documentfoundation.org/governance/members/application/.

LibreOffice @ Didacta

didacta01LibreOffice has been exhibiting at Didacta, a large event focused on the education – schools and universities – environment, from February 16 to February 20, 2016, in Koeln (Germany). Booth was attended by Ellen and Walter Pape, and Thomas Krumbein during the week, plus Andreas Mantke on Saturday. Volunteers have answered individual questions (often about compatibility between MS Office and LibreOffice) and have, when it came up, mentioned Libre Logo, Dmaths and the export as a Hybrid PDF.

LibreOffice was generally very well received, and volunteers were often addressed as “Nice that you exist”. The number of LibreOffice installations in education and in the private sector seems to have increased substantially in the last two years (at least, compared to Didacta 2014 in Stuttgart). Relevant people talked, for example, of a 30% increase in schools in NRW (North Rhine-Westphalia ).

In a tour around the fair one could see the wide range of educational materials about MS Office, quite often in combination with hardware. All (electronic) whiteboards are equipped with MS Windows and MS Office. For almost every profession there are countless textbooks / brochures in combination with Word, Excel and PowerPoint (for example, “Office Organization with Word 2013”). We still need to do a huge effort to raise the awareness and grow the market share of LibreOffice in the educational market.

Didacta 2016 Report in German, Spanish and French (ODT)

200,000 thanks

noun_23937We’ve received 200,000 donations in 1030 days, from May 1st 2013 to February 24th 2016, with an average of 194 donations per day. The best day was February 11th 2016 – the day after we announced LibreOffice 5.1 – with 474 donations. Together with volunteers who are contributing their time, and Advisory Board members who are investing in The Document Foundation, individual donors are making the dream of an independent self-sustaining free software-oriented foundation – capable of pushing the best free office suite to the next level of awesomeness – into a solid, enduring reality.

Back in 2010, when the independent foundation was announced, one of the most frequent objections was based on the assumption that a large free software project cannot exist without a single large corporate sponsor. After five and a half years, the dream has come true and has a bright future. Thanks to donations, we have been able to fund a large number of projects, from hackfests for developers to LibreOffice booths at exhibitions, along with native language community events, a stronger independent infrastructure, and so on. In addition, our staff is growing, taking care of background activities, and making things happen.

More importantly, we have been able to demonstrate that a large free software project does not need a single large corporate sponsor to thrive, but can rely on a diverse ecosystem based on companies and volunteers, and supported by individual donors. Companies come and go, while volunteers – and hopefully donors – stay, and possibly grow. So far, they have had the unique power of making a ten year-long dream come true, and become history. With a simple donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org, they can keep the history alive, forever.

200,000 thanks, again.

LibreOffice 5.1 Videos: Analytics

For LibreOffice 5.1 we created a playlist of short videos highlighting some of the new features in action. At the time of writing, these videos have been viewed over 50,000 times in total. Here’s the breakdown:

  • Calc: 15,346
  • Impress: 12,275
  • Writer: 25,229

Let’s take the Writer video and look at some of the viewer analytics data behind it. Interestingly, Spain currently provides the most viewers – whereas for the Calc and Impress videos, the USA is in first place. This chart shows the breakdown of the top 10 countries where the Writer video is popular:
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Open Document Format

The philosophy behind ODF: openness, freedom and control

File formats are not usually the subject of philosophical debate because most users just want to open, save and share…