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LibreOffice ecosystem interview: Thorsten Behrens at allotropia

LibreOffice is developed by a worldwide community, made up of volunteers, certified developers and companies in the wider ecosystem. Today we’re talking to Thorsten Behrens, who serves on The Document Foundation’s Board of Directors and works for allotropia…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m Thorsten Behrens, living in Hamburg, Germany. With a great team of LibreOffice experts, I run allotropia software GmbH, which specialises in Open Source and Open Standards consulting and products.

The code and the project itself had me involved from 2001 on (then still called OpenOffice.org).

What does allotropia provide in the LibreOffice ecosystem?

We strive to be a full-service shop for all things LibreOffice. Just to list a few examples, we have helped companies to train their internal development team alongside a LibreOffice migration; we’re regularly developing bug fixes and new features for the office suite, and we’re also maintaining a number of extensions for the benefit of the entire ecosystem (e.g. the LibreOffice Eclipse development plugin, the Edit in LibreOffice Nextcloud plugin, or the LibreOffice Starter Extension).

Additionally, we’re offering LTS (long-time supported) versions of LibreOffice, via our partner CIB software GmbH. In the same vein, we also maintain customer-specific LTS branches, in case a larger organisation has decided to stick with one particular version of the suite.

And not to forget, allotropia also sponsors Michael Stahl, one of the editors of the OpenDocument Format, to keep the ODF standard evolving and keeping up with all the new LibreOffice features that need saving to disk.

What has allotropia been working on in LibreOffice 7.3?

Besides lots of smaller additions for LibreOffice 7.3, one of the highlights we’re currently working on is a port of LibreOffice to directly run in a browser – without any need for a server installation. We’re provisionally calling it LOWA – LibreOffice WebAssembly, since WebAssembly (WASM) is the underlying browser technology this is using.

 

Another feature we’re quite proud of, is the rewrite of LibreOffice’s old network file access code. That work was sponsored by The Document Foundation, has landed in 7.3, solved a number of long-standing problems, and at the same time got rid of over 17,000 lines of (pretty old) code.

Looking beyond this release, what else are you planning to do?

There’s just a ton of work still to do, to make the LOWA LibreOffice really usable, so that will keep us pretty busy this year. Beyond that, we’re always eager to help making the overall developer experience for LibreOffice better – that helps us too, in our daily work! Along those lines, there’s another project currently underway, called CoverRest, to bring better and nicer integration with code coverage, static analysis and general code checking into the LibreOffice development process.

Find out more

LibreOffice 7.3: A week in stats

One week ago, we announced LibreOffice 7.3, our brand new major release. It’s packed with new features, and has many improvements to compatibility and performance too. So, what has happened in the week since then? Let’s check out some stats…

675,567 downloads

These are just stats for our official downloads page, of course – many Linux users will have acquired the new release via their distribution’s package repositories.

30,273 Tweet impressions

The announcement Tweet was viewed over 30,000 times, and had 535 likes and 183 retweets. We’re also on Mastodon, a FOSS-friendly federated microblogging service: our Mastodon toot had 80 likes and 42 shares. Meanwhile, the Facebook post reached 17,162 people, with 530 reactions and 116 shares.

41,532 video views

Our LibreOffice 7.3 New Features video has been popular, with 75 comments and 841 likes. (We also uploaded the video to PeerTube, an open source, decentralized and federated video platform.)

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1091 upvotes on Reddit

As always, we posted the announcement on the /r/linux subreddit, where it had 1091 upvotes and 99 comments. We also have our own dedicated /r/libreoffice subreddit – check it out!

Huge thanks to our worldwide community of volunteers, and certified developers, for all their work on this release!

LibreOffice ecosystem interview: Caolán McNamara at Red Hat

LibreOffice is developed by a worldwide community, made up of volunteers, certified developers and companies in the wider ecosystem. Today we’re talking to Caolán McNamara, a long-time LibreOffice developer who works for Red Hat…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m a Principal Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. on the Desktop Team since 2004! And I live on the west coast of Ireland.

What does Red Hat do in the LibreOffice ecosystem?

We try and do a lot of different things, from integration with the GNOME desktop, Calc and UNO work, and porting to architectures such as aarch64 and ppc64le, but I can highlight some of the efforts we make in detecting flaws close to when they get introduced into LibreOffice.

We maintain the regular crashtesting infrastructure, where we import and export 120,000+ documents and typically fix, or identify the triggering commit, any new import/export failures as they are discovered.

Similarly, we maintain the LibreOffice Coverity instance and work to keep the warnings to an effectively zero level in over six million lines of code, as part of that early detection of code flaw process.

In the same theme, we manage the LibreOffice OSS-Fuzz work and work to maintain the level of import related issues to a minimum, especially as a tool to detect potentially security related regressions before they are released, with over 1000 fixed to date.

We recently released LibreOffice 7.3 – what did you work on in that version?

The last user interface feature I did for 7.3 was a little rework of the calc autofilter dropdown, to add “popup on hover” of the color filter submenus and adding color names and some other tweaks, which itself was just an extension of Samuel Mehrbrodt’s (allotropia) more substantial LibreOffice 7.2 work to support color filtering in the autofilter.

Another feature we worked on that landed in upstream 7.3 was extension of the command line conversion of spreadsheets to comma separated value files to additionally support the optional export of each tab of a spreadsheet to a separate output CSV file.

Looking beyond this release, what else are you planning to do?

I’m working on GTK4 version of LibreOffice. It’s not finished by any means, but it’s mostly functional and making progress.

Follow Caolán’s LibreOffice work on his blog, and check out his FOSDEM talk about the GTK4 port.

LibreOffice 7.3 Community is better than ever at interoperability

In addition to the majority of code commits being focused on interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats, there is a wealth of new features targeted at users migrating from Office, to simplify the transition

Berlin, February 2, 2022 – LibreOffice 7.3 Community, the new major release of the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, is available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provides a large number of improvements targeted at users migrating from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, or exchanging documents between the two office suites.

There are three different kinds of interoperability improvements:

  • Development of new features, such as the new handling of change tracking in tables and when text is moved, which have a positive impact on interoperability with Microsoft Office documents.
  • Performance improvements when opening large DOCX and XLSX/XLSM files, improved rendering speed of some complex documents, and new rendering speed improvements when using the Skia back-end introduced with LibreOffice 7.1.
  • Improvements to import/export filters: DOC (greatly improved list/numbering import); DOCX (greatly improved list/numbering import; hyperlinks attached to shapes are now imported/exported; fix permission for editing; track change of paragraph style); XLSX (decreased row height for Office XLSX files; cell indent doesn’t increase on each save; fix permission for editing; better support of XLSX charts); and PPTX (fixed interactions and hyperlinks on images; fix the incorrect import/export of PPTX slide footers; fix hyperlinks on images and shapes; transparent shadow for tables).

In addition, LibreOffice’s Help has also been improved to support all users, with a particular attention for those switching from Microsoft Office: search results – which are now using FlexSearch instead of Fuzzysort for indexing – are focused on the user’s current module, while Help pages for Calc Functions have been reviewed for accuracy and completeness and linked to Calc Function wiki pages, while Help pages for the ScriptForge scripting library have been updated.

ScriptForge libraries, which make it easier to develop macros, have also been extended with various features: the addition of a new Chart service, to define charts stored in Calc sheets; a new PopupMenu service, to describe the menu to be displayed after a mouse event; an extensive option for Printer Management, with a list of fonts and printers; and a feature to export documents to PDF with full management of PDF options. The whole set of services is available with identical syntax and behavior for Python and Basic.

LibreOffice offers the highest level of compatibility in the office suite market segment, starting with native support for the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – beating proprietary formats in the areas of security and robustness – to superior support for DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files. In addition, LibreOffice provides 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).

LibreOffice 7.3 is available natively for Apple Silicon, a series of processors designed by Apple and based on the ARM architecture. The option has been added to the default ones available on the download page.

A video summarizing the top new features in LibreOffice 7.3 Community is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Raw0LIxyoRU and PeerTube: https://peertube.opencloud.lu/w/iTavJYSS9YYvnW43anFLeC.

A description of all new features is available in the Release Notes [1]

Contributors to LibreOffice 7.3 Community

LibreOffice 7.3 Community’s new features have been developed by 147 contributors: 69% of code commits are from the 49 developers employed by three companies sitting in TDF’s Advisory Board – Collabora, Red Hat and allotropia – or other organizations (including The Document Foundation), and 31% are from 98 individual volunteers.

In addition, 641 volunteers have provided localizations in 155 languages. LibreOffice 7.3 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. These include long-term support options, professional assistance, personalized developments and other benefits such as SLA (Service Level Agreements): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

Despite this recommendation, an increasing number of enterprises are using the version supported by volunteers, instead of the version optimized for their needs and supported by the different ecosystem companies.

Over time, this represents a problem for the sustainability of the LibreOffice project, because it slows down the evolution of the project. In fact, 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. Slowing down the development of the platform is hurting users at every level, and the LibreOffice project may fall short of its expectations and possibilities.

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 in line with proprietary offerings. Reference: https://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 7.3 Community

LibreOffice 7.3 Community is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements for proprietary operating systems are Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 and Apple macOS 10.12.

LibreOffice Technology-based products for Android and iOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/android-and-ios/, while for App Stores and ChromeOS are listed here: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-from-microsoft-and-mac-app-stores/

For users whose main objective is personal productivity, and therefore prefer a release that has undergone more testing and bug fixing over the new features, The Document Foundation maintains the LibreOffice 7.2 family, which includes some months of back-ported fixes. The current version is LibreOffice 7.2.5.

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

LibreOffice 7.3 is built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org

[1] Release Notes: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/7.3

Press Kit

Download link: https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/MnZEgpr86TzwBJi

LibreOffice project and community recap: January 2022

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

  • We started the month by announcing our plans for FOSDEM, which will take place online on February 5 – 6. The LibreOffice community will be present with many talks – join us!

  • Our awesome documentation community created a macOS version of the LibreOffice Writer Guide 7.2. This includes changes specific to the macOS version of the suite.

  • Meanwhile, we noticed that many OpenOffice users are receiving warning dialogs when opening files made in LibreOffice. This is because LibreOffice supports newer versions of OpenDocument Format, its native format, which aren’t available in OpenOffice. Click here to learn more.

Keep in touch – follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Mastodon. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join us and help to make LibreOffice even better!

Press Releases

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…

Open Document Format

The Role of ODF in the Era of Digital Identity and Authentication

Digital identity has become an integral part of everyday life. We use it to access work tools and sign documents…