LibreOffice Bay Area Meetup on May, 11 2013

After the success of the LibreOffice Impress Sprint in Germany last month, we are very happy to announce the first LibreOffice Bay Area Meetup. It will take place on May 11, 2013 starting at 2pm in the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California. Simon Phipps and Bjoern Michaelsen will be there and have some hopefully interesting topics prepared:

  • “Foundations and Empires” (Simon)
  • “LibreOffice, the Document Foundation, the universe and all the rest” (Bjoern)

We will also have time for some good Q&A, and most importantly: some hands-on work on how to get involved in the project.

We are excited this was made possible in collaboration with the friendly local folks helping us out here (notably and among others: Mike Higashi, Geo Mealer and Alison Chaiken) and hope to meet and greet many of you there.

You are invited, please consider dropping us a note here!

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 3.6.6

Berlin, April 11, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 3.6.6, for Windows, MacOS and Linux, targeted to enterprises and individual end users who prefer stability to more advanced features. This new release is suited to the increasing number of organizations migrating to LibreOffice, which is steadily growing worldwide.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation. There is a donation page – with many options including PayPal and credit cards – at http://donate.libreoffice.org, to support the growth of the project in areas such as infrastructure, marketing and development of native language communities.

LibreOffice 3.6.6 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center.

The change log – with over 50 bugs solved – is available at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.6.6/RC1 (fixed in 3.6.6.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/3.6.6/RC2 (fixed in 3.6.6.2).

Impress Sprint Dresden Retrospective

The weekend before Easter, a number of hackers congregated in the beautiful city of Dresden, Germany for the first Impress Sprint. Hosted by Dresden Technical University’s Institute for Applied Photophysics, and run by TDF volunteers, the event was rooted in the desire to improve Impress for power users, and getting a number of those tiny, but annoying little paper cuts and needless extra hoops to jump through eliminated.

TDF Hackfests and Sprints are taking place all over the world, organised and run by local volunteers, are excellent opportunities to taste the spirit of the LibreOffice community, and get you bootstrapped in a weekend to fix your first bug or two. As such, we are firm believers in the help-to-help-yourself paradigm. And it is fun, too!

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The rather long list of tackled bugs is here – thanks to all participants for making this a success!

If you want to join us the next time, following are the upcoming opportunities:

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0.2

Berlin, April 4, 2013 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.0.2, for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, the third release of the LibreOffice 4.0 family that fixes several small bugs and glitches.

This is another important milestone in the process of improving the quality and stability of the bleeding edge version of LibreOffice, and facilitating the migration process to free software. The Document Foundation has recently published a white paper to provide a reference roadmap for migrations to LibreOffice, which is available here: http://tinyurl.com/mwp-v1.

To foster the development of LibreOffice, The Document Foundation needs your support! There is a dedicated donation page at http://donate.libreoffice.org that lists various options to contribute to the budget of the charitable entity.

LibreOffice 4.0.2 is available for immediate download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org.

The change log is available at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.2/RC1 (fixed in 4.0.2.1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/4.0.2/RC2 (fixed in 4.0.2.2).

TDF releases White Paper to help migrations to LibreOffice

Berlin, March 27, 2013 – The Document Foundation releases a white paper to help organizations migrate to LibreOffice. Published on Document Freedom Day, the text explains how governments and enterprises can leverage Free Software to lower their IT expenditures and get rid of proprietary software lock-in.

The white paper can be accessed from here: LibreOffice Migration White Paper (of course, it is a Hybrid PDF document, which can be edited with LibreOffice).

According to the white paper, migrations to Free Software – and especially to LibreOffice – should follow a carefully crafted change management process, which needs to handle not only the technical aspects, which are actually the easiest ones to cope with, but also the barriers met when breaking long-term working habits.

LibreOffice liberates the users from proprietary document formats by adopting natively ODF (Open Document Format), which is the standard document format recognized by the largest number of organizations and supported by the largest number of desktop software (including Microsoft Office).

In addition, LibreOffice offers the largest set of import filters for proprietary document formats (including Microsoft Office, Publisher, Visio and Works, plus Corel Draw, Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPro, Quattro Pro and WordPerfect), and thus protects user investments in legacy applications, while providing a migration path to ODF.

Last but not least, LibreOffice templates are using only free fonts available on every OS which can be installed independently from any software package and thus foster interoperability between GNU/Linux, Mac OS and Windows users as documents maintain their original layout on every platform.

LibreOffice is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to maintain the infrastructure, and support events and marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at a global and local level.

Update: click here for the latest protocol documents

Impress Remote for Android: video and how-to instructions

Impress Remote for Android is one of the coolest features introduced by LibreOffice 4.0. With version 4.0.1, it is compatible with every platform – Linux, MacOS and Windows – and works like a charm.

In order to install and operate the Impress Remote you must first download it from Google Play on your Android smartphone, and then follow a simple procedure, which is described in this wiki page and also in this video:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM5H4fUxq4M&w=640&h=360]

If you like the Impress Remote for Android, please remember that The Document Foundation is a not for profit entity which lives thanks to the work of many volunteers, but also thanks to donations, which support infrastructure, marketing and community development.