LibreOffice at the Univention Summit 2023

Photo of LibreOffice stand

Thorsten Behrens and Lothar Becker from the LibreOffice community attended the recent Univention Summit 2023 in Bremen, northern Germany. They had a stand with LibreOffice merchandise, talked to visitors and answered questions. Lothar summarised the event:

It was well attended. Many known contacts, as well as new visitors, came by the stand and informed themselves or asked about LibreOffice – but also its availability in app stores for all platforms. Other topics that we frequently addressed at the stand included LibreOffice Technology, i.e. subscription versions from ecosystem partners, and their integration, e.g. in document management systems, where we were also able to refer people to the Collabora stand. Overall, it was emphasised again and again that it is important to have the project present at such an event.

Thanks to Thorsten and Lothar for attending! We plan to attend many more events this year – keep an eye on this blog for updates!

Photo of talk on stage

Love ❤️ for the LibreOffice community

Enio Gemmo

Today is I love Free Software Day, and we at The Document Foundation would like to say a huge thank you to everyone in the LibreOffice community! Whether you’re involved in development, QA, design, translations, marketing, infrastructure or any other projects – we ❤️ your support. Let’s keep doing awesome things together!

Sophie Gautier

LibreOffice at FOSDEM

Mike Saunders

Help to translate LibreOffice into Saraiki!

Parvez Qadir

LibreOffice is available in over 100 languages thanks to the great work of our localisation communities. And there’s always room for more! Recently, one LibreOffice user offered to translate into Saraiki, so let’s hear from him, to learn a bit more about the language:

Hello! I am Parvez Qadir, a native of Pakistan, and a Saraiki language translator in WordPress, Mozilla and other projects. I’m also an admin on the Saraiki Wikipedia and Saraiki Wiktionary.

Saraiki is a common language in the central region of Pakistan, and the number of speakers is 30 million. Millions of Saraiki people migrated to India in 1947, in the partition of India.

Thanks to Parvez for getting this translation project started! Everyone who knows Saraiki is welcome to join our localisation mailing list and drop us a line – we’d love to hear from you 😊

Writer and Calc Guides updated to new LibreOffice 7.5 release

The Documentation Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the Writer Guide and Calc Guide release 7.5, narrowing the time gap between the software release date and the Guides’ release date.

Writer Guide 7.5
Writer Guide 7.5
Calc Guide 7.5
Calc Guide 7.5

The Writer Guide 7.5 update was coordinated by Jean Weber with the support of Kees Kriek, Tsvetelina Georgieva, Antonio Fernández and Olivier Hallot. The Guide contains topics on Additional hyphenation settings (Chapter 2), Language Tool, a remote grammar checker (Chapters 2 and 20), Additional change tracking features (Chapter 3) Outline folding (Chapter 3), Page line-spacing for printed documents (Chapter 6), Gutter margins in page styles (Chapters 8 and 9), Revised and additional information about using styles (Chapter 8), Additional information about using master documents (Chapter 16), New features for bookmarks (Chapter 17) and Content controls (Chapter 18)

The Calc Guide 7.5 update was coordinated by Olivier Hallot, based on the Calc Guide 7.4. The guide contains topics on document properties (Chapter 1), AutoFilter with color filtering and more (Chapter 2), Chart data table (Chapter 3) and notes on AutoFormat of ranges and themes (Chapter 4 and 5).

The Guides are available for immediate download in PDF format as well as in source format (OpenDocument Format). Soon they will be available as printed books by LuLu inc. and in HTML format for online reading

Download the Writer and Calc guides 7.5 from the documentation websites at: documentation.libreoffice.org and the bookshelf at books.libreoffice.org.

Olivier Hallot
Olivier Hallot
Jean Weber
Jean Weber

Video: New Features in LibreOffice 7.5

A quick look at some of the new features in LibreOffice 7.5, which we announced yesterday!

(Click here to see this video on PeerTube.)

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Thanks to Nugroho Dwi Hartawan, Rania Amina and Ahmad Haris for the video. Original audio track: KOBT025 – Backing Track by Korochin Music JP.

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 7.5 Community

LibreOffice 7.5 banner

Berlin, February 2, 2023 – LibreOffice 7.5 Community, the new major release of the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, is immediately available for download for Windows (Intel/AMD and ARM processors), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel processors), and Linux.

Most Significant New Features

GENERAL

  • Major improvements to dark mode support
  • New application and MIME-type icons, more colorful and vibrant
  • The Start Centre can filter documents by type
  • An improved version of the Single Toolbar UI has been implemented
  • PDF Export improved with several fixes, and new options and features
  • Support for font embedding on macOS
  • Improvements to the Font Features dialog with several new options
  • Addition of a zoom slider at the bottom right of the macro editor

WRITER

  • Bookmarks have been significantly improved, and are also much more visible
  • Objects can be marked as decorative, for better accessibility
  • New types added to content controls, which also improve the quality of PDF forms
  • A new automatic accessibility checker option has been added to the Tools menu
  • Initial machine translation is available, based on DeepL translate APIs
  • Several spell checking improvements

CALC

  • Data tables are now supported in charts
  • The Function Wizard now lets you search by descriptions
  • “Spell out” number formats have been added
  • Conditional formatting conditions are now case insensitive
  • Correct behavior when entering numbers with a single prefix quote (‘)

IMPRESS & DRAW

  • New set of default table styles, and creation of table styles
  • Table styles can be customized, saved as master elements and exported
  • Objects can be drag-and-dropped in the navigator
  • It is now possible to crop inserted videos in the slide and still play them
  • The presenter console can also run as a normal window instead of fullscreen

A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 7.5 Community is available on YouTube and PeerTube. A description of all new features is available in the Release Notes.

Interoperability with Microsoft Office

Based on the distinctive features of the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, LibreOffice 7.5 provides a large number of improvements and new features targeted at users sharing documents with MS Office or migrating from MS Office. These users should check new releases of LibreOffice on a regular basis, as the progress is so fast, that each new version improves dramatically over the previous one.

LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite market segment, with native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats for security and robustness – to superior support for MS Office files, along with filters for a large number of legacy document formats, to return ownership and control to users.

Microsoft files are still based on the proprietary format deprecated by ISO in 2008, and not on the ISO approved standard, so they hide a large amount of artificial complexity. This causes handling issues with LibreOffice, which defaults to a true open standard format (the OpenDocument Format).

Contributors to LibreOffice 7.5 Community

LibreOffice 7.5 Community’s new features have been developed by 144 contributors: 63% of code commits are from the 47 developers employed by three companies sitting in TDF’s Advisory Board – Collabora, Red Hat and allotropia – or other organizations, 12% are from 6 developers at The Document Foundation, and the remaining 25% are from 91 individual volunteers.

Other 112 volunteers – representing hundreds of other people providing translations – have committed localizations in 158 languages. LibreOffice 7.5 Community is released in 120 different language versions, more than any other free or proprietary software, and as such can be used in the native language (L1) by over 5.4 billion people worldwide. In addition, over 2.3 billion people speak one of those 120 languages as their second language (L2).

LibreOffice for Enterprises

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners – for desktop, mobile and cloud – with a large number of dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLA (Service Level Agreements): www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

Every line of code developed by ecosystem companies for their enterprise customers is shared with the community on the master code repository, and improves the LibreOffice Technology platform.

Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS), for mobile platforms (Android and iOS), and for the cloud.

Migrations to LibreOffice

The Document Foundation has developed a Migration Protocol to support enterprises moving from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, which is based on the deployment of an LTS version from the LibreOffice Enterprise family, plus migration consultancy and training sourced from certified professionals who offer value-added solutions and services in line with proprietary offerings. Reference: www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.

In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and LTS options from certified partners – is the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 7.5 Community

Donate bannerLibreOffice 7.5 Community is available from: www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.14. LibreOffice Technology-based products for Android and iOS are listed here: www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/.

For users who don’t need the latest features, and prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing, The Document Foundation maintains the LibreOffice 7.4 family, which includes some months of back-ported fixes. The current version is LibreOffice 7.4.5.

The Document Foundation does not provide technical support for users, although they can get it from volunteers on user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: ask.libreoffice.org

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at www.libreoffice.org/donate.

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