Berlin, 2 October 2026 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 26.8.1, the first minor release in the LibreOffice 26.8 family, available for Windows, macOS and Linux. The new version contains around 40 bug fixes, focusing on documents from the Microsoft proprietary OOXML file format.

Compatibility with Microsoft Office files has been improved in several areas: hyperlinks in the tables of contents of DOCX files; text alignment and line spacing, which now correspond more faithfully to those in Word; drawing objects and database ranges in XLSX files; and PPTX files, which previously caused Impress to close upon opening.

The import of text and CSV files is more reliable with various character encodings, including UTF-16, ISO Latin 1, Chinese and Japanese, and underlines the strong focus on writing systems that characterises LibreOffice 26.8.

The full list of fixes is available at wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.8.1/RC1.

LibreOffice 26.8.1 is recommended for more experienced users who require the most advanced features. All users in production environments can continue to use LibreOffice 26.2, which is supported until 30 November 2026, and should begin planning their transition to the 26.8 family over the next two months.

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 26.8.1 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 26.8.1?
LibreOffice 26.8.1 is a bug-fix release containing around 40 fixes. It improves compatibility with Microsoft Office DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files, makes the import of text and CSV files with different character encodings – including UTF-16, ISO Latin 1, Chinese and Japanese – more reliable, and fixes other issues. It does not add any new features to LibreOffice 26.8.

Should I upgrade to LibreOffice 26.8.1?
Users running LibreOffice 26.8 should upgrade to version 26.8.1, which fixes bugs without changing any functionality. Users in production environments running LibreOffice 26.2 can remain on that version for a couple more months. LibreOffice 26.2 will reach the end of its lifecycle on 30 November 2026.

When will support for LibreOffice 26.2 end?
Support for LibreOffice 26.2 will end on 30 November 2026. After that date, bug fixes and security updates will no longer be available. Users should upgrade to the LibreOffice 26.8 family before that date.

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

• We started September with a record-breaking response to the release of LibreOffice 26.8: in its first week, the new version passed one million downloads, with more than 50,000 views, shares and likes on social media, and over 20,000 views of the new features video.

• And responding to questions about whether LibreOffice includes AI, we said: “No AI is now a feature”. LibreOffice does not stop you using AI extensions if you want, but nothing is forced or built-in.

• Then the design team shared results from a survey about LibreOffice Base, with feedback from 455 participants on how they use the database, what works well and what they would like to see improved.

• We also released LibreOffice 26.2.6, the sixth maintenance update to the 26.2 branch, with bug fixes and stability improvements.

• There was news about upcoming events: TDF will give two talks at the Open Source Conference Luxembourg in October, on digital sovereignty and the Cyber Resilience Act.

• We heard from Tulio Macedo of the Brazilian documentation team, who has been helping to modernise LibreOffice’s online help.

• TDF has partnered with TUXEDO to offer foundation members a 3% discount on Linux-powered laptops.

• The LibreOffice Conference in Pordenone took place, and after the event, we thanked the organisers and speakers and started work on video recordings.

• LibreOffice 26.8 brings improvements for right-to-left writing systems, including better paragraph direction handling in Writer and support for N’Ko and Adlam in Math. We explained why this work matters even when no commercial market is driving it.

• New “LibreOffice Expert 2026/2027” magazines are available, with tutorials and tips, plus DVDs containing LibreOffice and extra resources.

• The QA/Dev Report for August covered testing, bug fixes and other work by the quality assurance and development communities.

• In another post about 26.8, we described how LibreOffice preserves unsupported chart data when importing and exporting certain Microsoft Office files, helping users avoid losing content even when a chart type cannot yet be displayed or edited.

• For Software Freedom Day, we highlighted the freedoms LibreOffice offers: control over your documents and data, no licence fees or subscriptions, and the ability to choose how to participate and get support.

• We put the first batch of LibreOffice Conference videos online.

• Then, the LibreOffice community was present at FrOSCon 2026 near Bonn.

• An announcement: the VII Latin American Congress of LibreOffice will take place in San Salvador on 27–28 November.

• FLOSS/fund, the initiative from Zerodha, made a generous $100,000 contribution to LibreOffice. The support helps The Document Foundation improve infrastructure, fund development, and organise community events.

• A second batch of conference videos added 15 more talks to the playlist:

The LibreOffice project does extensive testing of every major update before release. But as it’s a large piece of software used in millions of different ways across the whole world, sometimes there are issues with certain setups. So The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind the suite, has expanded its team with a new QA Analyst, Bogdan Buzea. Let’s hear from him:

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’ve worked as an accountant for almost all my life here in Romania. As a hobby, over the last eight years, I have been involved as a volunteer in LibreOffice Quality Assurance. I was involved mainly in LibreOffice Writer, which I used most of the time in my accountant work, and I wanted to see things improve.

What’s your new role at TDF, and what will you be working on?

Since mid-September 2026, I have taken on the role of Quality Assurance Analyst. I go through bugs reported to Bugzilla, and triage them:

• Real bugs: Some reports identify real bugs in LibreOffice, and developers across the world do a great job fixing them day by day. More than 30% of the reported bugs get fixed.
• Missing information: Sometimes we receive an initial bug report, but no information or how to reproduce it or no sample document to test it. Imagine getting a report saying “When I search for something LibreOffice crashes”. This information by itself is not enough. Were diacritics involved? Were multiple documents opened at the same time? Was it a recent version of LibreOffice or an older one? Does it happen all the time? Has it happened before across many versions, or is it just in the new version? You could find more information on how to properly open a new bug report so we can test faster and find a solution.
• Duplicates: Some issues have already been reported, so we close those bugs as duplicates of older reports on the same problem. It’s completely fine for multiple users to report the same issue – in fact, it lets us know that the bug is very important to many people. So, if your report is closed as a duplicate, don’t be sad; you helped increase the priority of that specific bug report.
• User guidance: Other reports come from users doing things in an unintended way. While we assist them, a better way to get help is through the Ask LibreOffice forum, LibreOffice Online Help or the LibreOffice Documentation Shelf. There is a lot of information right where you needed it, and the articles and documentation available here frequently receive updates and contributions from volunteers worldwide. Often, users will say, “Great, it is working now! I didn’t know that I can do things that way.” To improve this, we work on updating documentation and adding tooltips to assist users as they work. If the software isn’t clear about how to use a specific feature, please report a new bug.

I also work on finding regressions …

On 28 September 2010, a group of OpenOffice.org community members announced the launch of the LibreOffice project and the foundation that would support it: The Document Foundation. The announcement sparked some confusion and scepticism, as well as enormous enthusiasm amongst those in the community who believe in free and open-source software.

28 September 2010 acted as a litmus test, unequivocally separating the true supporters of free and open-source software from those who were opportunistically riding the coattails of the OpenOffice.org project, or waiting for the right moment to stamp their own proprietary mark on it.

Sixteen years on, LibreOffice has been independent for longer than OpenOffice.org ever was under Sun Microsystems. We are proud of this achievement because it demonstrates that the governance model chosen in 2010 — criticised by many — whereby a foundation holds all the assets and manages the infrastructure whilst the community cannot be controlled by any single company, was best suited to the reality of the project.

Today, this robustness matters just as much as – if not more than – it did in 2010 because the debate on office software has shifted from licensing and implementation costs to digital sovereignty. It is a concept that we have championed for over 20 years, ever since OpenOffice.org began using the standard open ODF (Open Document Format) file format.

At the time, the term ‘digital sovereignty’ was not yet in use, but the issue was already clear: control over the format in which public documents are stored, and how this format evolves, must not lie with a single company, but with the community.

In this sense, ODF is the “sovereign” format par excellence because it does not depend on the authority — and therefore the commercial strategies — of a single company, but on the users — individuals, organisations, and businesses — who use it and determine its evolution through the contributions of experts within the independent OASIS Technical Committee, which comprises companies, foundations, public bodies, and individuals.

As the only “sovereign” format, ODF acts as a litmus test for office suites that claim to champion digital sovereignty yet continue to use the proprietary OOXML format, thereby submitting to Microsoft’s monopoly. They are in good company, given that even the scientific community has renamed our genome for the same reason.

LibreOffice is the only office suite to use ODF as its native format without proclaiming itself a champion of digital sovereignty because, after sixteen years of consistent behaviour, it does not need to chase trends to secure its place in the market. The figures prove it: today, downloads stand at a steady one million per week, and the updates website receives almost fifty million visits per month.

We would simply like all software that proclaims itself a champion of digital sovereignty to demonstrate the same level of consistency as the LibreOffice project. This means not bowing to the Microsoft monopoly in pursuit of a theoretical goal — namely, compatibility with Microsoft’s proprietary format — which ultimately leads them to betray the …

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m a software engineer from Hungary. I’ve been working in software engineering for more than a decade, with a background in both computer science and psychology.

I’ve been a long-time contributor to LibreOffice, mainly working on Writer and Impress, and I’ve also contributed to Collabora Online as part of the Collabora team. Throughout my career, I’ve always placed a strong emphasis on the quality of my work and on building things properly, even when that sometimes meant pushing back against management priorities.

Outside of software development, my current project is setting up my own camper van, intending to eventually explore Europe with it. I’m looking forward to combining some travel with my work on open source projects.

What’s your new role at TDF, and what will you be working on?

My new role at The Document Foundation is to participate in building LibreOffice Online. We are basically trying to create a Google Drive or Google Docs-like solution on top of LibreOffice as a document editor, and bring LibreOffice into the cloud. Currently, I’m doing some research into existing cloud infrastructures to identify best practices and avoid the same problems that other projects have encountered during the lifetime of their cloud implementations.

More details about the development strategy can be found in this post.

How can users of LibreOffice help you in this work?

Well, we’re still in the design phase, so there isn’t much room for involvement at this point. At some point, once we have the initial versions LibreOffice Online, feedback would be very much appreciated. We will post updates here on the blog.

Following the first batch, we’ve added 15 more videos to the playlist, bringing the total up to 26! There are more still to come, along with PeerTube versions of course – but for now, enjoy browsing the playlist:

Videos added in this batch

• Keeping track of an external Git repository (Xisco Fauli)
• Ten thoughts on community leadership (Florian Effenberger)
• One recognizable identity for the project’s websites (Juan José González)
• AI extension for LibreOffice Draw (Sara Hatami)
• Optimizing LibreOffice Writer for Writing Scientific Papers (Nawindah Nawindah)
• Distributing LibreOffice as an AppImage (Emiliano Vavassori)
• The State of Base: Where We Stand, What Comes Next (Vissarion Fisikopoulos)
• 21 years of Digital Sovereignty in South-Tyrolean Schools (Paolo Dongilli, Diego Maniacco)
• LibreOffice Technology, the FOSS platform for Digital Sovereignty (Italo Vignoli)
• Building a free AI assistant extension for LibreOffice Writer (Mihail Marian)
• Google Summer of Code (GSoC) panel
• Formatting Best Practices for LibreOffice Guides (Olivier Hallot)
• LibreOffice Certification: the updated program (Lothar Becker, Italo Vignoli)
• Seamless Collaboration: Versioning Flat ODF Documents with Git (Marco Marinello, Gabriele Ponzo)
• The past, the present, and the future – Edition 2026 (Heiko Tietze)

LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven, community open source project, backed by a non-profit entity, The Document Foundation. The vast majority of the foundation’s income is from community support, and we’re happy to announce that FLOSS/fund has made a very generous contribution of USD $100,000 to support the LibreOffice project and community.

FLOSS/fund is from Zerodha, a financial technology company and India’s largest stock broker. It is built heavily on FLOSS (free, libre and open source software) and gives up to USD $1 million to support projects around the world.

Kailash Nadh from FLOSS/fund (and CTO at Zerodha) says:

LibreOffice is one of the most consequential and impactful FOSS projects in the world. We also strongly believe that it has played an important role in enabling adoption of the Linux desktop among regular users. This belief in fact comes from our personal experience of transitioning over 1000 non-technical employees at our organisation to Linux over decade ago.

Many thanks to FLOSS/fund for their support. This helps us to improve our infrastructure, pay developers to work on the software, and organise events to share knowledge. Thank you!

The Salvadoran Lutheran University (ULS) and the Latin American LibreOffice Project community announce the seventh edition of the LibreOffice Latin American Conference.

Previous editions of the LibreOffice Latin American Conference have been held in person in Asunción (2019), Brasília (2022), Mexico City (2023), Montevideo (2024), and Havana (2025). The 2026 edition will bring the event to El Salvador for the first time, further expanding the reach of the LibreOffice community in Latin America.

ULS, the event’s host, has a long history of involvement with Free Software, most notably through the biannual FESOL (Free Software Educational Fair)—an event held for over 20 years that showcases dozens of projects developed by Computer Science students in areas such as web systems, databases, robotics, and video games, among others.

The conference will take place on November 27 and 28, 2026, with the aim of bringing together users and contributors to share knowledge and experiences related to LibreOffice.

Guest speakers from Mexico, Spain, Brazil, France, and Taiwan will present topics ranging from tutorials on using the applications to ways of collaborating with the project. The schedule will be announced soon on the official event website:

latam.conference.libreoffice.org

FrOSCon is an annual conference dedicated to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), held in Sankt Augustin (near Bonn), Germany. And this year, the LibreOffice community was there! We hosted a booth featuring information flyers and merchandise, including stickers, pens, coasters, and more.

We engaged in many substantive conversations at the booth about LibreOffice as a project and its specific features. We also discussed TDF’s development plans for web and mobile platforms and encouraged people to get involved in these areas.

Many visitors stopped by saying, “Of course we use LibreOffice” – often contrasting it with Microsoft Word, which is the “standard” or widely used option in corporate environments. We also frequently heard comments like, “I’ve/we’ve already donated.” Clearly, there is a widespread willingness to contribute financially to software that is both high-quality and genuinely free.

Visitors were happy to take home coasters or small stickers. LibreOffice supporters often like to place these items where Microsoft-oriented users can be found.

Alongside the project booth, Andreas Mantke gave a presentation in German titled “Where is LibreOffice Headed?” (Wohin führt der Weg von LibreOffice?), in which he discussed the project’s planned development ideas for web and mobile and answered questions from the audience.

We look forward to being at more events in the coming months!

Today, 19 September, is Software Freedom Day, a special day that the free software community celebrates every year on the third Saturday in September all over the world.

It is a good opportunity to look at LibreOffice from a perspective that is often taken for granted: not what the software does, but what it allows users to do and what it does not impose on them.

Free software is defined by four freedoms. LibreOffice guarantees all of them, and from these derives a range of other freedoms that are important for anyone writing a letter, preparing a budget or presenting a project.

The four freedoms

LibreOffice is distributed under the Mozilla Public Licence 2.0, which guarantees every user the four freedoms that define free software:

1. the freedom to run the programme for any purpose, without any restrictions whatsoever;
2. the freedom to study how the programme works, thanks to the availability of the source code;
3. the freedom to modify the programme to suit one’s own needs, both at an individual and an organisational level;
4. the freedom to redistribute copies of the software, including modified ones, so that other users may also benefit from its advantages.

The freedom to own your own documents

A document belongs to its author only if the format in which it is saved does not belong to someone else. LibreOffice uses the Open Document Format (ODF) as its native format: an ISO/IEC standard, developed at OASIS through a transparent, fully documented process, which no single company can control or modify unilaterally.

This means that a document saved today in ODF format will still be readable in twenty years’ time, either with LibreOffice or with other software that implements the standard. For private individuals, it is a matter of practicality. For public authorities, which have a duty to preserve documents and to communicate with citizens without forcing them to purchase specific software, it is a matter of principle.

The freedom to keep your data private

LibreOffice does not collect data on its operation, and does not require you to create an account. Documents are created, edited and saved on the user’s computer, and remain there unless the user decides otherwise. There is no mandatory link to a cloud service, and no user profile is created on a remote server.

The freedom to work without distractions

LibreOffice does not display adverts and does not prompt users to take out a subscription or sign up for a premium plan. The interface is designed to support users’ work, not to sell additional services.

The freedom to decide on artificial intelligence

LibreOffice does not include any generative AI features. Users who need them can add them via extensions and choose which service to use, including locally running models, whilst users who do not need them do not have to miss out on anything, as there is nothing to miss out on.

The freedom to choose platform and language

LibreOffice runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and documents transfer …