Design has been one of the major focus points of LibreOffice in recent years. The design/UX community has continued to support QA by evaluating user reports on Bugzilla, helping development with mockups, and mentoring volunteers and students in different projects. (This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.) Besides a large number of fixed issues on macOS thanks to Patrick Luby, and continuous work on the Navigator by Jim Raykowski, we had many more improvements – here is just a small selection: Improvements in LibreOffice 24.2 The column/row for active cells can be highlighted in Calc (implemented by Sahil Gautam) Tools ▸ Options was complemented by a search feature (Bayram Çiçek) Comment styles were introduced for quick and consistent formatting of all comments (Maxim Monastirsky) (depicted in the screenshot at the top of this post) Improvements in LibreOffice 24.8 Bundled templates were refactored with localized placeholders (Laurent Balland) New “Quick Find” deck in the Sidebar, which lists the search results along with their context (Khushi Gautam) Formatting characters are now treated independently from fields and do not toggle with non-printable characters (Heiko Tietze) “Keep Ratio” settings in the Position
In 2024, The Document Foundation and its global LibreOffice community undertook a variety of marketing initiatives aimed at increasing visibility, fostering community engagement, and driving adoption of LibreOffice (This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.) LibreOffice and Open Source Conference 2024 in Luxembourg A major highlight of TDF’s 2024 marketing activities was the LibreOffice and Open Source Conference, held from October 10 to 12 in Luxembourg. The annual event brought together contributors from around the world, including developers, designers, documentation writers, translators, and marketers. Marketing efforts for the conference included: A targeted social media campaign promoting the event’s location, speakers, and agenda. Outreach to local technology communities and universities in Luxembourg to boost participation. The creation of promotional graphics and materials highlighting the conference themes and goals. Live updates and content shared across LibreOffice’s social channels to engage a remote audience. The conference acted as a vital showcase of LibreOffice’s progress, community strength, and future plans. “Month of LibreOffice” Campaigns Throughout May and November 2024, TDF organized its recurring “Month of LibreOffice” initiative. This campaign aimed to recognize and reward community contributors across various roles, including development, documentation,
The Document Foundation is the non-profit entity that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community. In 2024 we had with elections for the foundation’s Membership Committee, along with regular Advisory Board calls, and support for other projects and activities (This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.) Election of new Membership Committee (MC) The mission of the Membership Committee is to administer membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in the Foundation’s Statutes. Members of the MC are directly elected by community members every two years, and serve for a two-year term. The Board of Directors consists of five members and three deputies. On July 15, Eliane Domingos – chairperson in the Board of Directors at TDF – announced the election for the next MC, and asked for nominations and self-nominations. On August 27, she then announced that the nomination phase had ended, and that voting would run from 3 – 9 September. Around this time there were also three live “town-hall” Q+A meetings with the candidates, so that community members could ask questions and discuss the responses. We made video recordings from the second and third meetings, and
The Nepalese community mentored CS50 students in Nepal create their very first resume for securing internships! Our Nepalese community writes… LibreOffice is a powerful open source office suite for many users worldwide. One of the major components is the word processing software, LibreOffice Writer, which is a highly effective tool for all levels of users. We in the Nepalese community recently conducted a CV writing session titled “LibreOffice Writer – Creating Reusable CVs”, delivered by our Liaison for the Nepalese community, Mr Suraj Bhattarai. This session was one of the guest sessions for the first and second year CS50 students at IOE Purwanchal Campus, who went through the CS50 AI course this time. The purpose of the session was to help them articulate their learning from the CS50x and CS50 AI timeline into a presentable resume, together with their other strengths, to get their very first internship into the tech industry. Suraj shared key insights when writing resume/CVs; he mentioned that the fact that fancy CVs or Canva templates are not yet a trend among hiring managers who happen to be millennials. What sells for a peak career or a first internship is a standard resume template. Apart from online
Tell us a bit about yourself! I live in Lagos, Nigeria, and I spend my time dabbling into user experience design with research, although these days, I’m diving deeper into research. I’m a big fan of books, especially well-written fiction. Music is also a huge part of my life. Let’s just say I love anything that sounds good and sing-alongs during work. What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now? I am an Outreachy intern working on improving the LibreOffice Writer templates with guidance from my mentor, Heiko Tietze. I have spent the last month understanding the community’s pain points by carrying out a survey, analysing their responses and working to create functional templates that they need. Currently, I am iterating on priority templates like DIN 5008 Business Letter, resume and academic writing templates. I am also doing some more research on template standards and reflecting on how to create templates that would help users. My top priority is to understand styling and implement it in the templates I am creating and also curate template contents that fits into prospective user preferences. Why did you choose to join the project, and how was the experience? During my
The new major release provides many user interface and accessibility improvements, plus the usual interoperability features Berlin, 6 February 2025 – LibreOffice 25.2, the new major release of the free, volunteer-supported office suite for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Linux is available on our download page. LibreOffice is the best office suite for users who want to retain control over their individual software and documents, thereby protecting their privacy and digital life from the commercial interference and the lock-in strategies of Big Tech. LibreOffice is the only office suite designed to meet the actual needs of the user – not just their eyes. It offers a range of interface options to suit different user habits, from traditional to modern, and makes the most of different screen sizes, optimising the space available to put the maximum number of features just a click or two away. It is also the only software for creating documents (that may contain personal or confidential information) that respects the user’s privacy, ensuring that the user can decide if and with whom to share the content they create, thanks to the standard and open format that is not used as a
