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!

Interviewing Hypra’s Jean-Philippe Mengual about software accessibility

Accessibility is a key factor for the inclusiveness of digital transformation, but only a few people are really competent in the topic. To learn more about accessibility, we interviewed Hypra’s co-founder, Jean-Philippe Mengual. Q1. Jean-Philippe, can you tell us about the birth of Hypra? A1. In 2008 I met Corentin at the Sciences Po higher-learning school in Aix-en-Provence. Through our friendship and the time we spent together studying, he realized how much IT can bring to visually impaired people, but also realized the current limitations. Together, we understood the revolution it represents: digital technology may erase some inequalities, when one knows how to use it of course. We studied how digital technology can bring equality between visually impaired and sighted people, and then we realized that other people may also benefit from this phenomenon. We were looking for a solution to this challenge, and we decided to create a computer that was accessible to all, easy to use, adaptable and accompanied by an empowering training. That is how Hypra was born. Q2. How challenging is it to work full-time to improve accessibility, and to help seniors and people with disabilities to leverage the opportunities offered by IT? A2. It is

LibreOffice 7.2 Community is strong on interoperability

Over 60% of code commits for the brand new version of the best free and open source office suite are focused on interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats Berlin, August 19, 2021 – LibreOffice 7.2 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 interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats. In addition, LibreOffice 7.2 Community offers numerous performance improvements in handling large files, opening certain DOCX and XLSX files, managing font caching, and opening presentations and drawings that contain large images. There are also drawing speed improvements when using the Skia back-end that was introduced with LibreOffice 7.1. LibreOffice 7.2 is now available natively for Apple Silicon, a series of processors designed by Apple and based on the ARM architecture. Because of the early phase of development on this specific platform, binaries are provided but should not be used for any critical purpose at this stage. Software will be available from the following page: https://download.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/stable/7.2.0/mac/aarch64/. LibreOffice and Interoperability LibreOffice 7.2 Community adds a significant number of improvements to interoperability with