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

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! Early in January, we released LibreOffice 7.2.5 with 90 bugfixes and compatibility improvements. 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. Over in the localisation project, we announced initial Klingon and Interslavic support in LibreOffice. If you have some knowledge of either of these languages, give us a hand! There was another guidebook update from our docs team in January: The LibreOffice Draw Guide 7.2. This covers the vector image editing component. In the middle of the month, we talked to Baltasar García Perez-Schofield about his work on the Basic interpreter, and becoming a Member of The Document Foundation. 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

LibreOffice project and community recap: December 2021

Happy new year, everyone! Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks of 2021 – click the links to learn more… We started December by announcing the LibreOffice Technology DevRoom Call for Papers for FOSDEM. This year, FOSDEM will take place online once again, and the LibreOffice community will be present with talks and discussions. Join us! At the recent Indian SFCamp 2021, Mike Saunders from the LibreOffice community gave a talk about our work, and where we’re going. He also explained how everyone can join the project and help to make LibreOffice even better. In December, TDF announced two updates for LibreOffice, for the 7.2 and 7.1 branches. These fix an important security issue and all users are recommended to upgrade. Meanwhile, the Coalition for Competitive Digital Markets, a group of more than 50 technology companies from 16 different European countries, sent an open letter to members of the European Parliament to raise awareness about interoperability and to impose stricter rules on big companies – the so-called ‘big tech’ companies – that act as gatekeepers and prevent transparency and openness in digital markets. In November, we ran a Month of

Record number of LibreOffice downloads

The chart says it all! Last week, we had a record number of downloads for LibreOffice in a single week. More and more people are discovering the free and open source office suite, the successor to OpenOffice, that respects users’ privacy and freedom. Downloads have been growing steadily over time, and one week ago we released an important security update, so we recommend downloading it, if you’re using an older version. Thanks to everyone in our wonderful worldwide community for all their help! It’s thanks to you that LibreOffice keeps going from strength to strength. Let’s keep spreading the word together 👍

EU coalition urges EU to push back against gate keeping by Microsoft, files official complaint

Brussels, November 26 – A coalition of EU software and cloud businesses joined Nextcloud GmbH in respect of their formal complaint to the European Commission about Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior in respect of its OneDrive (cloud) offering. In a repeat from earlier monopolistic actions, Microsoft is bundling its OneDrive, Teams and other services with Windows and aggressively pushing consumers to sign up and hand over their data to Microsoft. This limits consumer choice and creates a barrier for other companies offering competing services. Over the last few years have grown their market share to 66% of the EU market, while local providers lost out from 26 to 16%. By heavily favoring their own products and services (so-called “self-preferencing”) or outright blocking other vendors they leverage their position as gate keepers to extend their reach in more and more neighbouring markets and push users deeper into their ecosystems. Local, more specialised vendors are unable to compete “on the merits” as the key to success is not a good product but the ability to distort competition and block market access. “This is quite similar to what Microsoft did when it killed competition in the browser market, stopping nearly all browser innovation for over

Nine more videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2021

Here are some more videos from the LibreOffice Conference 2021! Check out the playlist, using the button in the top-right – or scroll down for links to individual videos: Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content Individual links Note: many of these are also available on PeerTube, and more will be added… A new open source tool for managing membership applications State of the Project and Marketing Plan Update The challenge of Using LibreOffice & Building Local Community in Korea There are no shortcuts to the magical world of technology (LPI) How to debug Writer, forwards and backwards (Episode 2) Expediting the Brazilian Portuguese Documentation Process Converting LibreOffice Guides into Web Pages Security in a Nutshell with Linux Essentials (LPI) (Spanish) Como se crean las certificaciones LPI desde Cero (LPI) There are just a few videos remaining – we’ll post them very soon!