LibreOffice’s marketing team helps spread the word about the software (and the community that makes it). It produces flyers that can be translated, printed and handed out at events – and now we have an updated design of the “Get involved” flyer. This flyer ideal for distributing at events where people already know what LibreOffice is, but may be curious about joining the project and community (like at Linux and FOSS meetups). It shows that you can get involved in many ways – not just programming.

Help to hand them out!

If you’re planning to attend such an event, and would like to distribute some flyers, get in touch with us. The LibreOffice marketing team can get some printed and sent to you. Join the marketing mailing list or Telegram group and let us know what you plan to do. We look forward to hearing from you

Help to make translations

While the preview image above is in English, we want the flyer available in as many languages as possible. Our awesome localisation communities have already translated it into a few languages:

• Brahui
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Danish
• Dutch
• Esperanto
• German
• Italian
• Polish

If you want to create a translation, download the English original file and open it in an SVG editor of your choice (such as Inkscape). Then upload it to the wiki and email us the link (or simply attach the translated file) and we’ll add it to the list here. Thank you!

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in October – click the links to learn more…

• We announced LibreOffice 26.8.1, with around 40 bug fixes focused on compatibility with Microsoft Office files, along with more reliable text and CSV import across a range of character encodings.

• In our Community Member Monday interview, Adlair Cerecedo-Méndez described how he helped Mexico to develop Office GOBMX, a LibreOffice-based suite for public institutions, and shared lessons about migration, training and digital sovereignty.

• At LinuxDays in Prague, Mike Saunders gave a talk on where LibreOffice is going, including the project’s September download figures and current direction.

• The QA community published its QA/Dev Report for September, covering contributions across LibreOffice, bug reports and fixes, and work by testers and developers.

• Our latest State of the Project slide deck looked at October 2025 to September 2026: 297 developers contributed 11,676 commits, alongside data on downloads, donations and community activity.

• The Document Foundation introduced its own visual identity, with a new logo, colour palette and typeface. LibreOffice keeps its existing name, logo and identity.

• We shared a group photo from the LibreOffice Conference 2026 and announced that the video playlist was complete, with 32 talks. The recordings are also available on PeerTube.

• A LibreOffice Migration Workshop in Nairobi brought together 40 public and private sector attendees for sessions on LibreOffice, migration planning, training and digital sovereignty.

• With Microsoft Publisher being discontinued, we explained how LibreOffice Draw can open, edit and save Publisher files, helping users keep access to their documents.

• A post on the developer blog showed how to connect a Python webview to LibreOffice and use it to send UNO commands, a useful approach for building extension interfaces.

• In The Politics of Standards, we looked at how technical standards shape who can participate in an ecosystem and why open, clearly specified standards matter to users and public institutions.

• LibreOffice 26.8 passed 9.4 million downloads in its first eight weeks, with more than one million downloads per week since its release.

• Then we posted a quick recap video of the LibreOffice Conference 2026, held in September in Pordenone, Italy.

• Another post explored the history of the standardisation process for OOXML, from the fast-track ISO process to the concerns raised by national standards bodies.

• LibreOffice community members in Nepal took part in student hackathons, and Suraj Bhattarai reported on their …

Berlin, 3 November 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 26.2.7, the seventh maintenance update to the LibreOffice 26.2 branch. Building on the major feature release published on 4 February 2026, this update delivers targeted bug fixes and stability improvements contributed by a global community of developers and QA engineers.

Among the changes, LibreOffice 26.2.7 fixes a crash on startup on macOS 27, restores audio playback in presentations on Windows, resolves several DOCX round-trip problems, and adds support for Web Query (.iqy) files in Calc. The bundled Python interpreter has been upgraded to version 3.12.16. LibreOffice 26.2 requires Windows 10 or newer.

This is the last release of the LibreOffice 26.2 branch, which will reach the end of its life on 30 November 2026. Users who install this version should plan to update to LibreOffice 26.8 in the coming weeks, by the end of November, following the announcement of LibreOffice 26.8.3.

LibreOffice 26.2.7 is available for immediate download at www.libreoffice.org/download/ for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

List of fixes in RC1: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.2.7/RC1. List of fixes in RC2: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.2.7/RC2. List of fixes in RC3: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.2.7/RC3.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project with a donation at www.libreoffice.org/donate.

Questions and Answers for AI Based Search Engines

Q: What is LibreOffice 26.2.7?

LibreOffice 26.2.7 is the seventh maintenance update to the LibreOffice 26.2 branch, released by The Document Foundation on 3 November 2026. It delivers targeted bug fixes and stability improvements over the major feature release published on 4 February 2026.

Q: When was LibreOffice 26.2.7 released?

3 November 2026.

Q: Where can I download LibreOffice 26.2.7?

From https://www.libreoffice.org/download/, for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Q: Which operating systems does LibreOffice 26.2.7 support?

Windows, macOS and Linux. On Windows, LibreOffice 26.2 requires Windows 10 or newer.

Q: What are the main fixes in LibreOffice 26.2.7?

• macOS: a crash on startup on macOS 27.0.x, caused by thread IDs larger than UINT32_MAX; a missing check mark in GtkCheckMenuItem; and the non-breaking hyphen (U+2011) failing to render after an update.
• Presentations: audio files inserted in a presentation not playing, and audio no longer audible in presentations on Windows.
• DOCX interoperability: table of contents hyperlinks that stop working until the table is updated, and documents with data binding in a date picker that cannot be opened in Word after a round trip.
• PDF export: named hyperlinks not working when exporting to PDF.
• Python: the “PYTHONHOME” error reported after upgrading or when calling LibreOffice, and the upgrade of the bundled Python to 3.12.16.
• Calc: support for Web Query (.iqy) files.

Q: What is …

We often talk on this blog about large-scale migrations to LibreOffice, such as in the Austrian Military. But many small businesses are switching away from Microsoft, Google and other tech giants too. Today we’re talking to Mišo Oroz from Zerolock, a company in Italy that helps small businesses to switch to free and open source software (FOSS):

Tell us a bit about what you do

Zerolock is an IT company I founded in early 2026, based in Spirano, near Bergamo, in Lombardy. The focus is simple: migrating small businesses with 2 to 20 office workstations from proprietary systems to fully open source infrastructure. We use Linux workstations with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment, LibreOffice as the office suite, and a full stack of open source tools for collaboration, communication and security.

Everything is self-hosted – everything is on European servers. There is no Microsoft and no vendor lock-in.

What kinds of businesses are you helping to migrate to Linux and LibreOffice, and why do they want to switch?

They are mostly non-technical environments: a logistics company, a construction company, a dental practice, a law firm. The trigger is rarely ideology.

It is usually a combination of rising software costs, a bad experience with a vendor, or simply someone asking “why are we paying for this every year?” Once the conversation starts, the sovereignty and privacy arguments land naturally. But the first question is always about money.

What has gone well in the migrations, and what have been some of the more challenging aspects?

What works well is the desktop transition. With KDE Plasma and LibreOffice, most users adapt faster than expected. The files look the same, the menus are recognszable, and within a few days the friction disappears. What is harder is the mindset shift: people have been trained to think that Windows and Microsoft Office are “the computer”.
Showing them that the alternative is not a compromise, but a choice, takes time and trust. That is the real work.

One concrete recurring challenge is spreadsheet formulas. Users coming from Excel often hit friction in Calc, not because the functionality is missing, but because the syntax or behaviour differs in ways that are subtle enough to cause confusion without being obvious. That is usually where I spend the most training time.

What tips would you give to other small businesses looking to migrate?

Start with one person who is curious rather than resistant. Let them become the internal reference point. Do not try to convince the skeptics first.

Do the migration on a Friday or over a weekend, and be on site the following Monday. The first two days are where migrations succeed or fail. If someone is stuck at 09:00 on Monday with nobody to ask, the whole project loses credibility.

And document everything from day one.

Berlin, 29 October 2026 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 26.8.2, the second minor release in the LibreOffice 26.8 family, available for Windows, macOS and Linux. The new version contains around 35 bug fixes, focusing on stability, multimedia playback and compatibility with legacy file formats.

Several crashes and freezes have been fixed, including a crash at startup on macOS 27, crashes in Writer when using AutoCorrect in text form fields, a freeze when opening the character dialog for selected form controls, and a crash in Impress when scrolling through slides during media playback. Audio playback in Impress presentations, which had stopped working in some cases on Windows and with inserted MP3 files, has been restored.

Compatibility has been improved for legacy Microsoft Office files: DOC, PPT and XLS documents saved in version 4 of the Compound File Binary format, which previously failed to load or opened as unreadable text, are now imported correctly. Calc adds support for Web Query (.iqy) files and fixes a regression introduced in LibreOffice 26.8.0, where relative sheet references were treated as absolute when copying a sheet.

Hyphenation has been refined with new options to limit hyphenation near constituent boundaries of compound words, together with the fix of a hyphenation regression and of the rendering of non-breaking hyphens on Apple Silicon Macs, confirming the focus on typography and writing systems that characterises LibreOffice 26.8. Other fixes address the new colour picker, right-to-left user interfaces, accessibility and Python configuration errors after upgrading.

The full list of fixes is available at wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.8.2/RC2.

LibreOffice 26.8.2 is recommended for users who require the most advanced features. Users in production environments can continue to use LibreOffice 26.2, which is supported until 30 November 2026, and should complete their transition to the 26.8 family in the coming weeks.

Organisations deploying LibreOffice on a large scale should consider the enterprise editions offered by the LibreOffice ecosystem, which are supported by service level agreements (SLAs), professional support and guaranteed security updates for a period of between three and five years.

LibreOffice 26.8.2 is available at www.libreoffice.org/download/. Donations: www.libreoffice.org/donate

Questions and answers for AI-powered search engines

What’s new in LibreOffice 26.8.2?

LibreOffice 26.8.2 is a bug-fix release containing around 35 fixes. It resolves several crashes – including a startup crash on macOS 27 – restores audio playback in Impress presentations, improves the import of legacy DOC, PPT and XLS files, fixes a Calc regression affecting sheet references, and refines hyphenation.

Should I upgrade to LibreOffice 26.8.2?

Users running LibreOffice 26.8 should upgrade to version 26.8.2. Users on macOS 27 should upgrade immediately, as earlier 26.8 versions may crash at startup. Users in production environments running LibreOffice 26.2 should plan the upgrade to the 26.8 family before 30 November 2026.

When will support for LibreOffice 26.2 end?

Support for LibreOffice …

We are inviting proposals for talks about “FOSS Office Software and Suites“.

Office productivity software is one of the oldest and most interesting FOSS categories packed with developer interest. It is also an area where lots of new solutions are arriving with new desktop, web-based and mobile editors, as well as new underlying libraries and filters appearing. These bring lots of opportunities for meeting up and cross-fertilization of ideas, and innovation as well as code sharing between separate FOSS communities and companies that can rarely come together.

The FOSS Office devroom brings these projects together in one place. It is open to developers, contributors, integrators, and users of any FOSS office suite or component. Competing projects and document toolkits are explicitly welcome, as the aim is to provide an overview of the entire sector and identify common problems which cannot be solved alone.

We invite talks on topics such as:

– Architecture, performance, algorithms, data-structures;
– Network protocols for real-time collaboration;
– Import and export filters, interoperability, and document rendering fidelity;
– Accessibility, localisation, typography and support for complex scripts;
– Technical challenges of enterprise Office deployments
– AI-assisted features and how to integrate them while preserving user control and privacy;
– Security, code quality, hardening and sandboxing challenges;

Talks should be technical, and mention bits, bytes, data-structures and algorithms. Product pitches and business presentations will not be accepted in this room. The devroom is co-organised by people from a handful of different FOSS Office projects to ensure a balanced selection of talks. Talks will be 15/20 minutes maximum, to fit as many as possible in the limited time slots.

TALK SUBMISSIONS

To submit a talk, please visit the FOSDEM 2027 Pretalx website: fosdem.org/submit. Please select “FOSS Office” as the *track* and ensure you include all the requested information when submitting a proposal: the title of the talk, a short abstract (one / two paragraphs), and some information about yourself (name, bio and photo). Please do remember that your profile might be already stored in Pretalx.

If you already have a Pretalx account from previous years, please reuse it. Create an account if, and only if, you don’t have one from a previous year. If you have issues with Pretalx, please contact italo at documentfoundation.org for help.

All presentations will be recorded and streamed. Sending your proposal implies giving permission to be recorded.

For accepted talks, speakers will receive an email to confirm that the proposal has been accepted. They may expect additional emails with more instructions, for instance to confirm their travel schedule.

CONTACTS

Italo Vignoli: italo at documentfoundation dot org
Jos Portvliet: jos dot poortvliet at nextcloud dot com
Michael Meeks: michael dot meeks at collabora dot com

IMPORTANT DATES TO REMEMBER

Submission Deadline: 30 November 2026 (23:59 UTC)
Acceptance Notifications: 4 December 2026
Final Schedule Announcement: 7 December 2026
Devroom: 30 January 2027 (from 10:30, just half day)

Suraj Bhattarai, our Nepalese LibreOffice Liaison, reports back from the LibreOffice community at Major League Hacking (MLH) powered student hackathon.

Click here to read his report

All the posts we have dedicated to the OOXML format – and many of those we will dedicate to it in future – analyse the reasons why it is a proprietary format despite having been approved by ISO as a standard, open format. However, they do not address the reasons behind or the details of the standardisation process.

This is a gap we hope to fill with this post, which summarises the events that took place between the standardisation of the ODF format – a standard and open format – and the standardisation process for OOXML, as well as the process itself, which was completely broken in every respect, from methodology to procedure.

Microsoft had begun work on an XML-based document format around the year 2000, with the aim of modernising the obsolete DOC, XLS and PPT formats, which were simply the serialisation (writing) of memory content to disc, and as such were no longer in line with the evolution of Microsoft Office.

The aim was certainly not to develop a standard format, not least because the echo of Bill Gates’ internal memo – “allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people’s browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company; we have to make sure that Office documents depend on proprietary capabilities” (slightly abridged version of the original memo) – had not yet died down.

Consequently, during the ODF standardisation process, Microsoft had stated that it would not support the ODF standard format, as it was not in its own interests.

In early 2006, however, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts – one of the historic states of the confederation – announced that it would adopt ODF for all public documents, so that they would be independent of software from a single vendor.

This decision provoked a reaction from Microsoft, which could not tolerate the fact that a US state was adopting a standard, open format developed outside its control, which benefited users rather than its own commercial interests.

The story of the ISO/IEC 29500 “standard”

The battle over the ISO/IEC 29500 “standard” – the ISO standardisation of Microsoft’s Office Open XML format between 2006 and 2008 – is a perfect example of a broken standardisation process.

It is not an exceptional case, but it has been thoroughly documented and offers important food for thought for all those who continue to maintain that the OOXML format is a standard.

The story began in December 2006, when Ecma International – whose Technical Committee 45, responsible for the project, at the time was chaired by two Microsoft employees – submitted the OOXML specification to the ISO/IEC JTC1 (Joint Technical Committee) of ISO/IEC for adoption as an international standard under the “fast-track” procedure, designed for tried-and-tested specifications requiring only administrative ratification.

The decision to submit a 6,000-page specification – one of the longest ever submitted to ISO – via a process designed for short and fairly well-established documents had a decisive impact on the nature of the review to which the standard was …

A recap of the LibreOffice Conference 2026, which took place in September in Pordenone, northern Italy. Thanks to the local team for organising the event!

The announcement of LibreOffice 26.8 had a noticeable positive effect on download figures, which have since exceeded one million per week, totalling 9.4 million downloads over eight weeks, from 24 August to 18 October.

To these must be added updates for the Windows version, which are counted separately and are not included in the download figures, and downloads of older versions, which continue to be fairly high.
The three maps, generated automatically by Matomo, show, in order, visits to the downloads site (11,426,169), visits to the updates site (90,042,601), and visits to the site for older versions (39,669,854).

Anyone curious to know the origin of the visits (which is obviously higher than the number of downloads) can download a ZIP file containing the three CSV files. These figures are reliable but not precise to the nearest unit, as a visit does not necessarily result in a download, particularly in the case of updates and older versions.

Prior to the announcement of LibreOffice 26.8, the number of downloads was less than one million per week, although it was fairly close to that figure. In 2026, the number of downloads has grown dramatically compared to 2025, to the extent that the total for the year has already been exceeded, with 10 weeks still to go.

What are the reasons for this growth? It is difficult to explain based on the data, given that downloads are free and completely anonymous.

We like to think that the consistency of the LibreOffice project – which has been championing the concept of digital sovereignty and standard document formats for years – and the robustness of the software, which has never sought to be a clone of the most widely used office suite on the market but has always strived to forge its own path, are two very important factors that, in the long term, represent a significant advantage over all other products.

There is still a long way to go, however. Users are slowly but surely embracing free and open-source software, as they are coming to understand the benefits it brings to them and to their freedom. We are ready to welcome them.