Learn new skills! Join the Month of LibreOffice, May 2023

Want to expand your skillset and gain experience with UX, marketing, documentation, QA or translations? Join the Month of LibreOffice, May 2023! Over the next four weeks, hundreds of people around the world will collaborate to improve LibreOffice – and you can help them. There are many ways to get involved, as we’ll see in a moment. And best of all: everyone who contributes to LibreOffice in the next four weeks can claim a cool sticker pack, and has the chance to win extra LibreOffice merchandise such as mugs, hoodies, T-shirts, rucksacks and more (we’ll choose 10 participants at random at the end): How to take part So, let’s get started! There are many ways you can help out – and as mentioned, you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a… Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers. First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 11 and LibreOffice 7.5.2”. Drum

LibreOffice project and community recap: March 2023

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 March by announcing the location of the LibreOffice Conference 2023: Bucharest in Romania! It will take place from Wednesday, September 20 (community meetings), to Saturday, September 23. Join us and register here! Throughout the month, we had three updates to LibreOffice – version 7.5.1 on March 2, and version 7.5.2 on March 30. We’re also maintaining the older LibreOffice 7.4 branch, and released 7.4.6 on March 9. LibreOffice installer improvements (on Windows) are coming, thanks to Rachael Odetayo, Ximena Alcaman and Outreachy mentors. We talked to Rachael about what she’s working on, and how the installation process will be simplified. Data protection and privacy is very important to us – and our users – in the LibreOffice project, so we’re happy to see that the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) is piloting the use of LibreOffice Technology. On March 8, we celebrated International Women’s Day! While we’re planning the LibreOffice Conference 2023, as mentioned, we’re also looking further ahead to 2024. If you’d like to host the conference in your location, get in touch

LibreOffice and Google Summer of Code 2022: The results

This year, LibreOffice was once again a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a global program focused on bringing more student developers into free and open source software development. Two projects were finished successfully. Students and mentors enjoyed the time, and here we present some of the achievements, which should make their way into LibreOffice 7.5 in early February 2023! You can experiment with the new features by using daily builds and report any problems in our bug tracker. VBA Macros – Tests and missing APIs by Hannah Meeks Mentors: Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora), Thorsten Behrens (allotropia) Hannah worked on an area that is important for power users dealing with Microsoft documents. Her work both improves VBA compatibility in LibreOffice and makes it easier to add missing functionality in the future. Learn more about the VBA Macros improvements in the final report. Extend Z compressed graphic format support by Paris Oplopoios Mentors: Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) Paris got off to a flying start with the originally defined goal, which was to add import functionality for Z compressed EMF and WMF graphics and thus to improve compatibility with Microsoft documents. In the end, he also implemented exporting of WMZ, EMZ

The Document Foundation celebrates its first anniversary

LibreOffice has just been awarded IDG’s InfoWorld BOSSIE Awards 2011 and OWF Experiment Awards 2011 for best of Open Source software The Internet, September 28, 2011 – The Document Foundation (TDF) celebrates its first anniversary, one year after the unveiling of the project and the release of the first beta of LibreOffice. “What we have achieved in just twelve months is incredible,” says Charles Schulz, a member of the Steering Committee. “Let’s have a look at some numbers: we have 136 members who have been nominated for their contributions to the project; we have some 270 developers and 270 localizers (although we always want to attract more), many of whom are also members; we have over 100 mailing lists, with over 15,000 subscribers, half of whom receive all our announcements; and there have been thousands of articles in the media worldwide”. LibreOffice is the result of the combined activity of 330 contributors – including former OpenOffice.org developers – having made more than 25,000 commits. The developer community is well balanced between company-sponsored contributors and independent community volunteers: SUSE and community volunteers new to the project have provided around 25% each of the commits, with a further 20% coming from RedHat