Developers invited to contribute their add-ons Community-based review process ensures quality and reliability LibreOffice, the free office productivity suite, can be enhanced with hundreds of extensions and templates. Users can download these smart extras to improve the suite’s functionality to fit their job or hobby, and developers can easily write their own add-ons and share it with millions of users worldwide. Since, at the moment, there is no reliable and stable source for downloading these handy add-ons, the LibreOffice community has put great efforts into launching a public repository. It does not only provide extensions and templates for LibreOffice, but also for OpenOffice.org and other compatible office suites. Users of these can benefit from the work and the commitment of our community, and are invited to have a look at recent versions of our product, which already has included has the most popular extensions, and comes with many new features. The new site is now in public beta testing at http://extensions-test.libreoffice.org and http://templates-test.libreoffice.org and has been created in cooperation with the Plone community, on whose technology it is based. To ensure the quality and reliability of the offered extensions, a community-based review process is currently set in place: Community volunteers
Continuing our mission to provide the best LibreOffice documentation for our end users, the Documentation Team is proud to announce the release of the latest Writer Guide for LibreOffice 26.2. Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, this guide covers all aspects of the LibreOffice Writer module—from creating simple one-page document to full book using the best practice in text editing, text formatting and document compilation. This guide is the result of teamwork by LibreOffice Community volunteers. We extend special thanks to Dione Maddern, Claire Wood, Miklos Vajna, Ed Olson, B. Antonio Fernandez, Peter Schofield and Olivier Hallot. “This is our first edition of the Writer Guide using Nextcloud Deck to manage the production process. It has been a bit of a learning curve for our team, but it has greatly improved task tracking and communication.” Said Dione Maddern, volunteer Writer Guide coordinator. The guide was updated from LibreOffice 25.8 and 26.2 and included several new sections on new features as well as contents on features not yet documented in the previous editions. The Guide is up to date with LibreOffice 26.2 release and included the following updates: Chapter 2 – Working with Text: Basics: Updated to show improvements
The LibreOffice documentation team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the Calc Guide 26.2. Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, this guide covers all aspects of the LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet module—from creating simple shopping lists to performing advanced data analysis and complex calculations. “We examine the Calc guide from the end user’s perspective—covering step-by-step instructions, explanations of the spreadsheet’s internal workings, and illustrating the use cases where each feature applies” said Olivier Hallot, Documentation Coordinator and Guide Lead for Calc.
The European Commission has accepted our request, and starting from today – Friday March 6 – has added the Open Document Format ODS version of the spreadsheet to be used to provide the feedback. We are grateful to the people working at DG CONNECT, the Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, for responding to our request within 24 hours. At this point, the rest of this message is no longer relevant, and the call for action is no longer necessary. ARCHIVED MESSAGE The European Commission has spent years advocating for open standards, vendor neutrality, and digital sovereignty. The European Interoperability Framework explicitly recommends open formats for public sector digital services. The EU’s own Open Source Software Strategy calls for reducing dependency on proprietary technologies, and the Cyber Resilience Act itself is designed to address systemic risks from unaccountable technology dependencies. On March 3rd, 2026, the European Commission published a request for feedback on to the guidances to be provided in relation to the CRA, which must be provided through the linked spreadsheet in .xlsx format, a proprietary format that makes interoperability extremely difficult due to its ever changing and undocumented features. This is not a minor procedural oversight.
This year, LibreOffice was once again a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a global program focused on bringing more developers into free and open source software development. Seven projects were finished successfully. Contributors and mentors enjoyed the time, and here we present some of the achievements, which should make their way into LibreOffice 26.2 in early February 2026! You can experiment with the new features by using daily builds and report any problems in our bug tracker. Import Markdown files into LibreOffice Writer by Ujjawal Kumar Chouhan Mentors: Thorsten Behrens (Collabora), Ilmari Lauhakangas (TDF) Requests to add support for the simple text formatting language known as Markdown to LibreOffice have been more and more frequent. These days Markdown is often encountered in forum posts, chat messages and readme files. In fact, the content of the website of The Document Foundation is written in Markdown. Thanks to this project, LibreOffice now supports importing Markdown files and pasting Markdown content into Writer as well as pasting Markdown tables into Calc. The supported dialect is CommonMark with GitHub-style table syntax and the library used is MD4C. Additionally, Collabora developers added support for exporting to Markdown from Writer. Learn more
This is the third and final post on the topic of the artificial complexity of the OOXML format. This complexity is the result of careful design aimed at preventing interoperability. Developers have to deal with a veritable “maze” of tags, even for the simplest content. This binds users to the Microsoft ecosystem, providing the first example of standard-based lock-in. The PPTX case To demonstrate the difference in complexity between Impress and PowerPoint XML schemas in ODF and OOXML formats, I created a simple eight-slide presentation summarising the most common types: title and subtitle, centred text, bulleted list, table, vector image, photo, colour graphics and video. I created the same file using both software programmes, starting from a basic template without a background to prevent interference with the slide format and, consequently, the XML schema. This is the PDF file of the presentation (the first seven slides are identical, while the video on the last slide is replaced by a static image): To perform the analysis, I duplicated and renamed the two files, replacing the original extension with ‘ZIP’, and then unzipped them to create two folders containing all the files from their respective XML schemas. The LibreOffice folder is very
