Berlin, March 6, 2017 – The Document Foundation’s Documentation Team announces the immediate availability of the new Getting Started with LibreOffice guide version 5.2. The guide was updated to include the developments of LibreOffice 5.2 and previous releases. The Getting Started guide is an introductory text for end users on using the LibreOffice office suite. It is written for individuals as well as organizations that deploy LibreOffice as their preferred office suite tool. The text allows users to get familiar with the features and resources of LibreOffice and shorten the time to become productive in office document edition. The guide is written in LibreOffice Writer in Open Document Format (ODF). The team worked to not only update the contents but also to clean the formatting used in the text with a double objective: One is to make the text suitable for computer aided translation (CAT) tools and the other is to generate an online version (XHTML) of the guide. The documents composing the Guide were formatted using styles only, avoiding direct formatting that has impact on CAT tools and on HTML export. For HTML export, the underneath template of the documents was adapted to handle the unmatched formatting properties between
Berlin, February 1st, 2017 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.3, one of the most feature-rich releases in the history of the application. The office suite is immediately available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and for the first time also for the private cloud. LibreOffice 5.3 represents a significant step forward in the evolution of the software: it offers an introduction to new features such as online with collaborative editing, which increase the competitive positioning of the application, and at the same time provides incremental improvements, to make the program more reliable, interoperable and user-friendly. “LibreOffice is backed by a fantastic community of developers”, says Michael Meeks, a member of the board of The Document Foundation. “In 2010, only a few people were betting on our capability of attracting a large number of code contributors, which are instrumental for the success of a large code base. In six years we have attracted over 1,100 new developers and, thanks to this large community, during the last two years we have had an average of 300 people active on the source code”. LibreOffice 5.3 highlights LibreOffice 5.3 offers a number of interesting new features in every area: a new cross-platform text layout
Information on the ODF standard and how to move your organization to ODF-compliant document solutions The document has been forked in a textual format (Pandoc’s Markdown) by Paolo Dongilli, to keep track of versions and changes, correct typos, add new content and easily fork it for localization purposes. It is available on GitHub: https://github.com/paolodongilli/ODF-Guidance. This guidance gives general information on the standard, as well as more detailed information for chief technology officers and government procurement officers. Table of Contents: Introduction to Open Document Format (ODF) Procure ODF solutions Base ODF solutions on user needs Validators and compliance testing Platforms and devices Accessibility Privacy and security Avoid macros in documents Integrate ODF with enterprise tools Extensions, plugins and custom solutions Collaborate on documents Change tracking in ODF Embed fonts in ODF documents Corporate styles and templates ODF spreadsheets and formulas Support and training Overview of productivity software Costs and benefits of ODF
LibreOffice 5.1.5 “still” announced, for enterprise class deployments Berlin, August 3, 2016 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.2, a feature-rich major release of the best free office suite ever created – targeted to early adopters and power users – with several user interface improvements and enterprise grade features. At the same time, LibreOffice 5.1.5 has been released, for enterprise class deployments and more conservative office suite users LibreOffice 5.2 provides document classification according to the TSCP standard, and a set of improved forecasting functions in Calc. In addition, multiple signature descriptions are now supported, along with import and export of signatures from OOXML files. Interoperability features have also been improved, with better Writer import filters for DOCX and RTF files, and the added support for Word for DOS legacy documents. Additional type argument values for interoperability with other spreadsheets, along with wildcard support in formula expressions for compatibility with XLS/XLSX and ODF 1.2, have also been added. In term of user experience, a single toolbar mode has been added to Writer and Calc to help users really focus on content, and some icons have been added to the default toolbars to make several frequently used functions – such as
Every contribution to the LibreOffice project – whether it’s a large code patch or just a small bug report – makes the software better for everyone. Over the last few years we’ve had many thousands of contributions from all around the world, and in May 2016 we really want to highlight all the effort goes in to LibreOffice. So we’re running a new campaign to credit everyone who contributes to the project! Barnstars If you’re involved with LibreOffice development, design, documentation, translation or QA, and want to show your appreciation for someone’s efforts, award them a barnstar on our special wiki page. This is a bronze, silver or gold icon that shows your thanks for that person’s help or contribution, like so: To award a barnstar, all you have to do is visit the wiki, log in, and copy and paste the template. Fill in the details for the person you want to credit and show your appreciation! Badges Meanwhile, LibreOffice contributors can earn badges throughout May by doing various jobs. These include: confirming a bug report, having a code patch committed to the LibreOffice source tree, translating a string in the interface, helping users, and more. They look like
The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to design and implement a profile safe mode for LibreOffice to start work as soon as possible. For bug reports and QA issues, users are from time to time required to use a fresh user profile, i.e. without settings different from the built-in defaults, with no document restore enabled and with all extensions disabled. Until now, the easiest route to achieve this is to delete or rename the existing user profile. A feature should be implemented that enables the user to start LibreOffice in a temporary safe mode as outlined above, without having to manually delete their profile, and with the ability to return to the regular state afterwards. In addition, the user should be able to choose which elements are to be put in safe mode, e.g. configuration, extension, documents, templates, and also be presented with an option to actually reset their profile permanently. Besides an UI item from where the functionality can be triggered, the safe mode dialog should also pop up after a program crash to help the user identify and report the problem. The scope of
