Recently, Linux New Media released an updated version of its “LibreOffice Expert” magazine, which contains tutorials, tips and tricks about LibreOffice. And some articles were contributed by members of the LibreOffice community! The magazines come with DVDs that include LibreOffice for Linux, Windows and macOS, alongside extra templates, extensions, videos and guidebooks. We have some copies to give away, for schools, universities and local communities. Ideally, we’d like to get these magazines out to places where internet connections aren’t always available – so that the users can really benefit from the DVDs. So, if you can help us to distribute these magazines, drop us a line! Please note that we can only send a maximum of five copies to any one place, to make sure many people get a chance. When you contact us, please include this information: What you want to do with the magazines How many you want The address to which we should post them Include that information in an email to us and let’s see what we can do! (Note: if you want to buy the magazine directly from the publisher, you can do so here.)
The Annual Report of The Document Foundation describes the foundation’s activities and projects, especially in regards to LibreOffice and the Document Liberation Project. We’ve been posting sections of the 2022 report here on the blog, and now the full version is available in PDF format on TDF’s Nextcloud server in two different versions: low resolution (8.2MB) and high resolution (57.4MB). The Annual Report is based on the German version presented to the authorities. The document has been entirely created with free open source software: written contents have obviously been developed with LibreOffice Writer (desktop) and collaboratively modified with LibreOffice Writer (online), charts have been created with LibreOffice Calc and prepared for publishing with LibreOffice Draw, drawings and tables have been developed or modified (from legacy PDF originals) with LibreOffice Draw, images have been prepared for publishing with GIMP, and the layout has been created with Scribus based on the existing templates. We at The Document Foundation are very grateful to all contributors to our projects and communities in 2022 – none of this would be possible without you!
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 July by welcoming Michael Weghorn to The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice. Michael is a developer and will initially focus on accessibility improvements. Talking of the TDF team: in June, team members met in Munich to discuss ideas and proposals for the community and software. They worked on lots of topics – and now we’ve uploaded the report of the meeting. Check it out and let us know what you think! More news from the foundation: the Membership Committee (MC), which is responsible for managing membership applications and renewals, announced a new membership management system called Proteus. Meanwhile, our documentation and localisation communities did some great work: they updated the Getting Started Guide to LibreOffice 7.5, and finished a Czech translation of the LibreOffice Draw Guide 7.4. Awesome! We had one release in July, LibreOffice 7.5.5. This is the fifth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 7.5 branch, and all users are recommended to get the update. And finally: our Extensions and Templates website received a bunch of improvements, thanks to TDF’s new Web
In 2022, the marketing team continued the deployment of the Strategic Marketing Plan, without overlooking ongoing activities to promote LibreOffice and support the efforts of native language communities (This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2022 – we’ll post the full version here soon.) LibreOffice Strategic Marketing Plan We have invested in the deployment of the Strategic Marketing Plan, with additional activities such as the release of generic presentations about The Document Foundation (History, and Digital Sovereignty), LibreOffice (Technology, also with comments, and Sustainability) and Open Document Format (Generic, ODF and Interoperability, and OOXML Issues), to be used by community members. Videos who help to personalize a slide deck according to the audience are also available. We have also released a White Paper about LibreOffice Technology, to explain the evolution of LibreOffice from a single desktop product to a product based technology for individual or enterprise productivity, which is the foundation for a series of products optimized for different platforms, such as desktop, mobile and the cloud. To underline the importance of the LibreOffice Technology concept, a specific logo has been created, to make visually easier to associate all products based on this technology platform. A second
Here at The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind the LibreOffice community, we have many websites and services: this blog, the LibreOffice website, our wiki, the extensions website, Weblate and many more. To improve them and keep them up-to-date, TDF now has a new Web Technology Engineer! So let’s get to know him… Tell us a bit about yourself! My name is Juan José and I am from México. I moved from my beautiful hometown to Guadalajara nearly thirteen years ago looking for a good job as a developer and I fell in love with the city. In Guadalajara I met my wife, my friends and many free software enthusiasts. Since the first day, I realized that there were local communities around free software so I like to keep in contact with them, and contribute with technical talks about various topics. I studied a masters degree in Computer Science, where I got interested in the semantic web and the automated reasoning discipline behind it. I’ve been working as a web developer for more than a decade now. I am so happy that I found this position at The Document Foundation – I am determined to contribute as much as I
The new Calc Guide 7.4 bring updated information for users on the latest LibreOffice 7.4 release. Skip Masonsmith and Kees Kriek of the LibreOffice Documentation Team are happy to announce the immediate availability of the LibreOffice Calc Guide 7.4. The guide is for beginner to advanced users of Calc, the spreadsheet component of LibreOffice. The book introduces the features and functions of LibreOffice Calc. It is not a tutorial on using spreadsheets. Some chapters assume familiarity with basic spreadsheet usage when describing how to use Calc. “It has been fantastic to join the LibreOffice documentation community of technical writing experts. As I worked on the Calc Guide 7.4 updates, I was well supported by the team to ensure the best outcome for everyone. It was a great experience and I look forward to working on more guides with the team.” said Skip Masonsmith, Calc Guide 7.4 coordinator. The teamwork effort of Skip and Kees allowed to release the Calc Guide 7.4 in record time. The team decided to skip the Calc Guide 7.3 and merged it into the latest release 7.4. The guide is available to download at the Documentation website and at the LibreOffice Bookshelf website. Both PDF and
