Berlin, August 24, 2015 – LibreOffice Conference 2015 will open in a month from now, on September 23, at the Dokk1 in Aarhus, Denmark. The Dokk1 is the brand new Mediaspace of the city, featuring the Main Library and Citizens’ Services
LibreOffice Conference 2015 will be hosted in the Auditorium and in the Meeting Area of the beautiful building, designed by Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects and part of the conversion of Aarhus inner harbour to city space.
Pictures by Adam Mørk, courtesy of the City of Aarhus.
The conference will be hosted by the City of Aarhus, and will be jointly organized by the Danish LibreOffice community together with local F/OSS groups and the Aarhus municipality. Logistics are managed by the not-for-profit organisation “Foreningen Dansk LibreOffice Konference 2015”.
Local Contacts:
Carsten Agger (Open Space Aarhus)
Line Dybdahl (Aarhus Municipality)
Leif Lodahl (LibreOffice Denmark)
René Lagoni Neukirch (LibreOffice Denmark)
Berlin, August 19, 2015 – Following the announcement of LibreOffice 5.0, The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the availability of LibreOffice in Guarani, the language spoken by 80% of the population in Paraguay, and the official second language of the country.
Guarani is spoken in the area in yellow
Guarani is spoken in parts of northeastern Argentina (Corrientes, Formosa,Misiones, eastern parts of the Province of Chaco, and at isolated points of Entre Rios), is the second official language of the Argentine province of Corrientes since 2004, is the co-official language of Bolivia, and is spoken in several cities of the eastern state of Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil. Guarani is also one of the official languages of Mercosur (source: Wikipedia).
LibreOffice in Guarani has been be presented on August 13 at OEI (Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos) facilities in Asunción, Paraguay, to a selected audience. TDF and LibreOffice have also been presented in the Centro Nacional de Computación of UNA (Universidad Nacional de Asunción) in San Lorenzo Campus.
The localization to Guarani was carried by a single volunteer: Giovanni Caligaris. LibreOffice in Guarani is immediately available for download from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/.
“Back in 2011, I started discussing with the CIO of a Paraguayan corporation at the LibreOffice Conference in Paris, and we envisioned how to get the office suite in Guarani”, said Olivier Hallot, a founding member of TDF, and a LibreOffice advocate. “Unfortunately, the project stalled, until Giovanni Caligaris picked up the task, and managed to localize LibreOffice in Guarani in a rather short timeframe”.
“With the availability of LibreOffice in Guarani, Paraguay positions itself at the same level of more developed countries, and represents an incentive for countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia to conduct a localization project for their native languages”, said Giovanni Caligaris. “The next task is to increase the LibreOffice awareness in Paraguay, with the help of the LibreOffice community”.
With the addition of Guarani, LibreOffice gets closer to the vision of the founding members of the project, to bring the free office suite in their native language to 100% of the world population, to reduce the digital divide based on the familiarity with one of the languages spoken in the richest countries. Today, close to 90% of the world population can use LibreOffice in their native language.
LibreOffice 5.0 has been announced on August 5. So far, results have been astounding!
150,000 donations, and counting
Following the announcement, donations have doubled in comparison to the previous weeks. As a consequence, we have reached the threshold of 150,000 donations since May 2013, when we started keeping track of the numbers. A huge thanks to all donors! With their money, they make LibreOffice sustainable, supporting the costs of the entire organization.
35,000 unique IPs visited the blog
In one week, the blog has got 46,068 pageviews from 34,935 unique IPs, four times as many as the previous week (clicking on the thumbnail, you can view a higher resolution image).
Over 1,000 articles
LibreOffice 5.0 has been covered by all major IT publications worldwide (only PC Magazine has ignored the announcement so far). Over 1,000 articles have mentioned LibreOffice 5.0, with over 500 covering the subject in depth based on the press kit, a conference call or an interview. If you are interested in the list of in depth articles, you can download a PDF file with all the relevant links.
Windows 10 compatibility and superior interoperability features
Immediately available for Linux, MacOS X and Windows
Berlin, August 5, 2015 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.0, the tenth major release since the launch of the project and the first of the third development cycle. LibreOffice is a full feature open source office suite which compares head to head with every product in the same category, while it stands out for superior interoperability features.
LibreOffice 5.0 builds on the success of the 4.x family, which has been deployed by over 80 million users (source: TDF estimate, based on users pinging for updates), including large organizations in Europe and South America.
LibreOffice 5.0 sports a significantly improved user interface, with a better management of the screen space and a cleaner look. In addition, it offers better interoperability with office suites such as Microsoft Office and Apple iWork, thanks to new and improved filters to handle non standard formats. Other improvements have been added to every module of the suite, and Windows 64bit builds (Vista and later) have been added.
LibreOffice 5.0 Highlights A new version for new endeavours: LibreOffice 5.0 is the cornerstone of the mobile clients on Android and Ubuntu Touch, as well as the upcoming cloud version. As such, LibreOffice 5.0 serves as the foundation of current developments and is a great platform to extend, innovate and collaborate!
A beautiful office suite designed by a fantastic community: With new icons and major improvements to menus and sidebar, LibreOffice looks nicer and helps users in being creative and getting things done the right way. In addition, style management is now more intuitive thanks to the visual preview of styles right in the interface.
Spreadsheets that rock: LibreOffice 5.0 ships with an impressive number of new and enhanced spreadsheet features: complex formulae, new functions, conditional formatting, image cropping, table addressing and much more. Calc’s blend of performance and features makes it an enterprise-ready, heavy duty spreadsheet capable of handling all kinds of workload for an impressive range of use cases.
Better filters for better documents: LibreOffice 5 ships with many improvements to document import and export filters, for an enhanced document conversion fidelity all around. In addition, it is now possible to timestamp PDF files generated with LibreOffice.
A complete list of the most significant new features is available on the accompanying press release, and has also been published on the website at the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/discover/new-features/.
LibreOffice 5.0 has also been improved “under the hood,” thanks to the precious work of hundreds of volunteers. According to Coverity Scan, the number of defects for 1,000 lines of code is now consistently below 0,001. This translates into an open source office suite which is not only easier to develop but it’s also easier to maintain and debug. In fact, the amount of solved bugs is now over 25,000, and is increasing rapidly.
Last, but not least, LibreOffice 5.0 has been improved in terms of quality and stability thanks to a large number of tests performed on new builds by going through thousands of documents to spot crashers, bugs and regressions.
“In 2010, we inherited a rather old source code, which had to be made cleaner, leaner and smarter before we could reasonably develop the office suite we were envisioning for the long term,” says Michael Meeks, a Director at TDF and a leading LibreOffice developer. “Since 2010, we have gone through three different development cycles: the 3.x family, to clean the code from legacy stuff; the 4.x family, to make the suite more responsive; and the 5.x family, to make it smarter, also in terms of user interface.”
“LibreOffice 5.0 is such a good product that people used to legacy open source office suites feel overwhelmed by the amount of new features and improvements,” adds Thorsten Behrens, TDF Chairman and leading LibreOffice developer. “Switching from any OOo derivative to LibreOffice is a giant leap into the future of free office suites.”
Availability and enterprise deployments
LibreOffice 5.0 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is targeted to technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users.
For enterprise class deployments in organizations of any size, TDF maintains the more mature 4.4.x branch (now at 4.4.5). In any case, TDF suggests to deploy or migrate to LibreOffice only if the project is backed by certified professionals providing Level 3 support, migration consultancy or training courses according to recognized best practices (http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/).
Berlin, July 30, 2015 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.4.5, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 4.4 family, with over 80 fixes over the previous version. LibreOffice 4.4.5 is replacing LibreOffice 4.3.7 as the “still” version for more conservative users and enterprise deployments.
The Document Foundation suggests to deploy LibreOffice in enterprises and large organizations with the backing of professional support by certified people (a list is available at: http://www.documentfoundation.org/certification/).
Registration for LibreOffice Conference 2015, which will be hosted by the Danish city of Aarhus from September 23 to September 25, is now open at the following page: http://conference.libreoffice.org/2015/registration/.
The LibreOffice community is growing, and the conference is the best opportunity to join the fun by meeting a large group of the people that have contributed to the success of the project: developers, and volunteers who have localized the suite, chased the bugs, written the manuals, spoken at conferences, and advocated LibreOffice both at global and local levels.
Clicking on the thumbnail will open the high resolution image
LibreOffice 5.0 will be announced next Wednesday – August 5, 2015 – at noon UTC. It is our tenth major release, and the first of the third stage of LibreOffice development. To show the impressive amount of new features added to LibreOffice since version 3.3, released in January 2011, we have compiled a summary of all previous announcements.
LibreOffice 5.0 will add 64bit Windows builds to already available 32bit Windows, 64bit MacOS and 32/64bit Linux builds, and will be compatible with Windows 10.
LibreOffice 3.3, January 25, 2011 – LibreOffice 3.3 was the first stable release of the FOSS office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010 to well over one hundred in January 2011. This has allowed to release LibreOffice 3.3 ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project.
LibreOffice 3.3 highlights:
The developer community has been able to build their own and independent process, and get up and running in a very short time (with respect to the size of the code base and the project’s strong ambitions);
Thanks to the high number of new contributors having been attracted into the project, the source code is quickly undergoing a major clean-up to provide a better foundation for future development of LibreOffice;
The Windows installer, which is going to impact the largest and most diverse user base, has been integrated into a single build containing all language versions, thus reducing the size for download sites from 75 to 11GB, making it easier for us to deploy new versions more rapidly and lowering the carbon footprint of the entire infrastructure.
LibreOffice 3.4, June 3rd, 2011 – LibreOffice 3.4 was the second major release of the FOSS office suite since the announcement of The Document Foundation in September 2010. Contributors were over 120 (six times as many as the first beta released on September 28, 2010).
LibreOffice 3.4 highlights:
Calc was reacting faster and offered a better compatibility with Excel spreadsheets, while Pivot Tables – formerly known as DataPilots – could now support an unlimited numbers of fields and named range as data source;
The user interface of Writer, Impress and Draw was improved with new features;
The visual look of the Linux version was updated with several cosmetic changes, with a better text rendering engine and an improved GTK+ theme integration;
Several thousand lines of comments were translated from German to English, and over 5.000 lines of “dead” code were removed from Writer, Calc and Impress.
LibreOffice 3.5, February 14, 2012 – LibreOffice 3.5 was the third major release and was tagged as “the best free office suite ever” as the activity of developers started to surface, after the first two major releases focused on the engine. The release was the result of the combined effort of an average of 80 developers per month, providing a total of over 30.000 code commits.
LibreOffice 3.5 highlights:
Writer: a new built-in Grammar checker for English and several other languages; improved typographical features, for professional looking documents; interactive word count window updating in real time; a new header, footer and page break user interface;
Calc: support for up to 10.000 sheets; multi-line input area; new functions conforming to the ODF OpenFormula specifications; better performances when importing files from other office suites; multiple selections in autofilter; unlimited number of rules for conditional formatting;
Impress / Draw: improved importer of custom shapes and Smart Art from PPT/PPTX; possibility to embed multimedia/colour palettes into ODF documents; new display switch for the presenter’s console; new line ends for improved diagrams; Microsoft Visio import filter;
Base: new integrated PostgreSQL native driver.
LibreOffice 3.6, August 8, 2012 – LibreOffice 3.6 was the fourth major release, with a large number of features and incremental improvements over previous versions, ranging from hidden ones – performance – to more visible ones such as user interface tweaks.
LibreOffice 3.6 highlights:
Import of Corel Draw files, and PDF export with watermarks;
Integration with Alfresco via CMIS and limited Sharepoint integration;
Improved auto-format function for tables in text documents, and color-scales and data-bars in spreadsheets;
Microsoft Smart-Art import in text documents, and improved import and export of CSV-files;
A cleaner look, especially on Windows PCs, a new splash screen, and several new presentation master-pages.
LibreOffice 4.0, February 7, 2013 – LibreOffice 4.0 was the fifth major release, and the first to reflect the objectives set by the community at the time of the announcement, in September 2010: a cleaner and leaner code base, an improved set of features, a superior interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem.
In less than 30 months, the LibreOffice project has attracted over 500 developers – 75% independent volunteers – capable of contributing over 50.000 commits. The resulting code base is rather different from OOo, as several million lines of code have been added and removed, and 25.000 lines of comments translated from German to English.
LibreOffice 4.0 highlights:
Integration with several content and document management systems – Alfresco, IBM FileNet P8, Microsoft Sharepoint 2010, Nuxeo, OpenText, SAP NetWeaver Cloud Service and others – through the CMIS standard;
Better interoperability with DOCX and RTF documents, thanks to new features and improvements (like attaching comments to text ranges);
Import of Microsoft Publisher documents, and improvement of Visio import filters with the addition of the 2013 version;
UI incremental improvements, including Unity integration and support of Firefox Themes (Personas) for a personalized look;
Introduction of the widget layout technique for dialog windows, which makes it easier to translate, resize and hide UI elements, reduces code complexity, and lays a foundation for an improved user interface;
Different first page header and footer on a Writer document, without the need of a separate page style;
Additional performance improvements to Calc, plus new features such as export of charts as images (JPG and PNG) and new functions defined in ODF OpenFormula;
First release of Impress Remote Control App for Android;
Significant performance improvements when loading and saving many types of documents, with particular improvements for large ODS and XLSX spreadsheets and RTF files;
Management of code contributions through Gerrit: a web based code review system, facilitating the task for projects using GIT.
LibreOffice 4.1, July 25, 2013 – LibreOffice 4.1 was the sixth major release, with a large number of improvements in the area of interoperability with proprietary office suites.
LibreOffice 4.1 highlights:
Many improvements to Microsoft OOXML import and export filters, as well as to legacy Microsoft Office and RTF file filters;
Font embedding in Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw, to helps retain the visual aspect when fonts used in documents are not installed on the target PC;
Import and export functions new in Excel 2013 for ODF OpenFormula compatibility;
Symphony sidebar from AOO, which will be further integrated with the widget layout technique to make it dynamically resizeable.
LibreOffice 4.2, January 30, 2014 – LibreOffice 4.2 was the seventh major release, with a large number of performance and interoperability features especially appealing to power and enterprise users, and better integrated with Microsoft Windows.
LibreOffice 4.2 highlights:
Large code refactoring of Calc, giving major performance wins for big data (especially when calculating cell values, and importing large and complex XLSX spreadsheets);
Optional new formula interpreter enabling massive parallel calculation of formula cells using the GPU via OpenCL, optimized for the AMD HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture);
Round-trip interoperability with Microsoft OOXML files, especially for DOCX, as well as for legacy RTF documents;
New import filters for Abiword and Apple Keynote documents;
Simplified custom install dialog to avoid potential mistakes, and ability to centrally manage and lock-down the configuration with Group Policy Objects via Active Directory (Windows specific);
Better integration with Windows 7 and 8, with thumbnails of open files grouped by application and a list of recent documents showing on the task bar;
New Expert Configuration window added to the Advanced Options tab;
New Start screen with a clean layout that improves the use of available space even on small screens and shows a preview of last documents;
Impress Remote Control for iOS – in addition to the app for Android – which allows visual management of presentation delivery on the laptop using the screen of an iPhone or iPad;
Windows (IAccessible2 based) accessibility feature developed by IBM;
New beautiful monochrome “flat” icon theme: Sifr.
LibreOffice 4.3, July 30, 2014 – LibreOffice 4.3 was the eighth major release, to a point of maturity that makes the software suitable for every kind of deployment, when backed by value added services by the growing ecosystem.
LibreOffice 4.3 highlights:
Interoperability: support of OOXML Strict, OOXML graphics improvements (DrawingML, theme fonts, preservation of drawing styles and attributes), embedding OOXML files inside another OOXML file, support of 30 new Excel formulas, support of MS Works files, and Mac legacy file formats;
Comments can now be printed in the document margin, formatted in a better way, and imported and exported in ODF, DOC, OOXML and RTF documents, for improved collaboration;
More intuitive behaviour of Calc spreadsheets, thanks to the smarter highlighting of formulas in cells, the display of the number of selected rows and columns in the status bar, and the ability to select text export format at user level;
Support of “monster” paragraphs exceeding 65.000 characters, thanks to the solution of an 11 years old OOo bug based on the modernization of the source code by developers.
LibreOffice 4.4, January 29, 2015 – LibreOffice 4.4 was the ninth major release, with a large number of user interface improvements, plus better interoperability with OOXML files and outstanding source code quality (based on Coverity Scan analysis).
LibreOffice 4.4 highlights:
Support of OpenGL transitions in Windows, with an implementation based on the new OpenGL framework;
Installation of free fonts Carlito and Caladea to replace proprietary Microsoft C-Fonts Calibri and Cambria, to get rid of font related issues while opening OOXML files;
Addition of several new default templates, designed by volunteers;
Visual editing of Impress master pages, to remove unwanted elements, adding or hiding a level to the outline numbering, and toggling bullets on or off;
Better Track Changes – with new buttons in the Track Changes toolbar – and AutoCorrect features in Writer;
Improved the import filters for Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Works and AbiWord, and added the import filters for Adobe Pagemaker, MacDraw and RagTime for Mac;
Digital signing of PDF files during the export process.
Berlin, August 24, 2015 – LibreOffice Conference 2015 will open in a month from now, on September 23, at the Dokk1 in Aarhus, Denmark. The Dokk1 is the brand new Mediaspace of the city, featuring the Main Library and Citizens’ Services
