Welcome to The Document Foundation Planet

This is a feed aggregator that collects what LibreOffice and Document Foundation contributors are writing in their respective blogs.

To have your blog added to this aggregator, please mail the website@global.libreoffice.org mailinglist or file a ticket in Redmine.


Thursday
19 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-19 Thursday

16:50 UTC

face
  • Up early, tech planning call in the morning, mail catch-up, admin and TORF pieces.
  • Really exited to see the team get the first COOL 25.04 release shipped, coming to a browser near you:
    COOL 25.04 released!

    Seems our videos are getting more polished over time too which is good.
  • Mail, admin, compiled some code too; bit patch review here & there.

Wednesday
18 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-18 Wednesday

21:00 UTC

face
  • Up too early, out for a run with J. Sync with Dave. Plugged away at calls, admin, partner call, sales call, catch up with Moritz, Philippe and Italo.
  • Birthday presents at lunch - new (identical) trousers, and a variable DC power supply for some electronics.
  • Published the next strip around the excitement of setting up your own non-profit structure:
    The Open Road to Freedom - strip#22 - Our own structure!
  • Fine steak dinner with the family in the evening.

face

Stefan Soyka, StarOffice developer in the early '90s

LibreOffice is the successor project to OpenOffice(.org), which in turn was based on StarOffice, a proprietary office suite developed in the 1990s. Learn more about the history here! And let’s hear from Stefan Soyka, who worked on StarOffice from 1990 – 1992…

When did you join Star Division, and what did you work on?

I came from Berlin to Hamburg to work for Marco Börries in his Star Lab in spring 1990, together with my friend and study mate Stefan. Both of us joined the project more or less at the same time and shared the same first name, which caused some confusion at first.

The situation in Hamburg needs some explaining if you are new to it. The Writer application that is the foundation of what we use today is not the first Star Writer – but thesedays it is often referred to as Star Writer 6 or Star Writer Graphic. Marco’s company Star Division, based in rural Lüneburg not far from Hamburg, had developed and sold with considerable success a text processing application with the same name, that was an MS-DOS application based on a home-grown graphics framework. A team of freelance programmers was working on it under the lead of Sven-Ola Tücke.

This was also the tool we used to write the first drafts for specifications, by the way.

The old Star Writer had a solid fanbase and sold quite well even after Star Lab started in Hamburg. So it is fair to say that the money we burned in Hamburg was earned in Lüneburg.

Marco, however, had the right feeling that graphical user interfaces were already around and taking up speed. The future (that is the time we live in now) would belong to applications running on the main graphical user interface platforms at this time, being Microsoft Windows, the X Window System and macOS. Of course there were voices that argued that graphical user interfaces were only hampering productivity and real pros would always use the command line. That may sound a bit funny today, but I took it all in my heart.

When I arrived there, development had pretty much advanced in the compatibility layer named Star View, that allowed portable programming of both operating system functions and graphical user interfaces. There was, however, no application yet. Because I had worked on a C++/X Window System project on the ODA standard (ISO 8613, Open Document Architecture), I had some background on this and formed with some others the core of the Star Writer project team.

Star Division logo

Tell us about the office location and team back then!

The offices of Star Lab at that time were at Heidenkampsweg, near Berliner Tor, in Hamburg in a quite modern building. I remember the adjacent gas station; many of us were heavy cigarette-smokers at that time, and I sometimes went there at night to get the next pack.

Dirk Bartels supervised the daily operations. He had a software company back in Berlin and


Tuesday
17 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-17 Tuesday

21:00 UTC

face
  • Longish planning call, lunch, sync with Moritz & Eloy, Monthly mgmt meeting, sync with Andras, partner call late.
  • Out learner-driving with newly 17 years old E. Plugged through CofE child safeguarding foundations training on-line.

Monday
16 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-16 Monday

21:00 UTC

face
  • Dropped car to garage with Laser, sync with Miklos, Thorsten, lunch with H. and M. Call with the marketing team, sync with Naomi, Eloy & more admin.

face

LibreOffice at the Linux Arena in Pordenone

Marco Marega writes:

Hi, I’m Marco, an Italian translator and Member of The Document Foundation. Twice a year I take part in an event in Pordenone to promote LibreOffice within the stand “Linux Arena” of the PNLUG Linux User Group. It’s inside a local fair, part of which is dedicated to technology, makers, electronics and so on.

For the event from April 25 – 27 we had a LibreOffice stand with a 32″ monitor, showing an Impress presentation about LibreOffice on a loop. At the stand I met different interested people – some of whom I already know since they visit the fair regularly, while others I saw for the first time.

There is always curiosity about LibreOffice, and this time I noticed an increasing demand about AI integration and related plugins. The LibreOffice coffee/beer mats were very much appreciated by visitors to the stand.

LibreOffice at the Linux Arena in Pordenone

The Pordenone Linux User Group invited other associations to share the stand, so there were also:

  • Trieste Linux Users Group, with a nice game to learn bash commands while trying to deactivate a bomb
  • Odoo group, presenting the ERP/CRM/…
  • Bergamo Linux Users group presenting OpenWRT and some other projects (Emiliano Vavassori is one of them)
  • A Blender expert
  • Another member who uses openSUSE for multimedia production
  • A corner where volunteers helped visitors to install Linux on their PCs, or to solve little problems

The next edition of the event will be on 22 – 23 November.

LibreOffice at the Linux Arena in Pordenone


Sunday
15 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-15 Sunday

21:00 UTC

face
  • Left sleeping babes in bed. All Saints in the morning, back for a fine Pizza lunch - with Fathers Day Baked Alaska special.
  • Prepped tunes for the evening service, and ran that with Christine; home for some applied rest.

Saturday
14 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-14 Saturday

21:00 UTC

face
  • Up early, helped E. tidy up somewhat, present opening, out bowling together as a family: fun.
  • Home for lunch, sung songs, played games the babes variously - nice, BBQ in the evening together.

face

Over the course of its 20-year history, the ODF standard has been adopted, or at least recommended, by numerous supranational bodies and several countries on almost every continent. However, this does not necessarily mean that the ODF standard is used in accordance with these decisions, which are often laws in their own right, as Microsoft’s substantial lobbying and misinformation campaigns aimed at protecting its revenue of around $25 billion generated by the proprietary OOXML format (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX) encourage the use of the latter. This is despite the fact that the disadvantages for national systems, communities of citizens and individuals are very easy to demonstrate: loss of control over content, interoperability problems and dependence on the commercial strategies of a single vendor.

The information in this post is based on my research into sources relating to the adoption or recommendations for the use of ODF. I began compiling this collection of documents around 2010 and continue to update it annually. Over the last twelve months, I have also used artificial intelligence in my research, which has helped me find some articles.

Unfortunately, formal adoption or recommendation of ODF does not guarantee its actual use in accordance with the law. For example, the latest version of Italy’s Digital Administration Code explicitly prohibits the use of OOXML because it is not a standard, yet this decision is largely ignored by public bodies.

SOVEREIGN BODIES

NATO requires all 28 member countries to use ODF as the standard format for document exchange.

UN and NGOs: UN organisations favour standard and open formats to ensure that all documents remain accessible and do not depend on expensive or restricted tools. This is why ODF is used for reports, policy drafts, and collaborative documentation between teams.

European Commission: has taken a strong stance in favour of open standards and promotes the use of formats such as ODF in documents through its open source software strategy. The European Parliament, the European Commission and the EUIPO (European Union Intellectual Property Office) have integrated LibreOffice and ODF into their internal workflows to ensure greater transparency and language neutrality.

EUROPE

Belgium: Since September 2007, all Belgian federal government departments have been required to accept and read ODF documents, and a memorandum has established ODF as the standard for the exchange of office documents within the federal public administration.

Denmark: From 1 April 2011, the Danish Parliament has mandated the use of ODF by state authorities for the exchange and archiving of documents, whereas previously agencies were only required to accept ODF documents. In recent weeks, articles have claimed that the Danish government will formally migrate to open-source software and, therefore, to ODF. We are, of course, seeking confirmation of this project.

Finland: The Ministry of Justice and other ministries have adopted ODF as the main document format.

France: The Référentiel Général d’Interopérabilité (RGI) recommends ODF as the preferred format for office documents in public administrations. Agencies are therefore encouraged to use ODF


Friday
13 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-13 Friday

21:00 UTC

face
  • Sync with Dave in the morning, lots of back-to-back meetings, partner call, catch up & planning with Pedro, call with Philippe. H. home from Greece and N. too - lovely to have the family back together again!
  • Tidied the house somewhat for E's 17th birthday party, a mass of small(ish) girls over to the house dressed up variously, 22 girls + me - amusing. Chatted to larger babes.

face

LibreOffice 25.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.8 Beta1 the second pre-release since the development of version 25.8 started at the beginning of December, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.8 Alpha1, 782 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 154 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 25.8 Beta1 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it can be installed alongside the standard version.

In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ).

For help, you can contact the QA Team directly in the QA IRC channel or via Matrix.

LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!

Happy testing!!

Download it now!


Thursday
12 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-12 Thursday

21:00 UTC

face
  • Tech. planning call in the morning, great to have Thorsten & Stephan too, crush of meetings and allotropia merger fun to push on.
  • Sync with partners, Lily, Laser, counsel, Tracie. M. home in the evening lovely to have her back.

face

Screenshot of colour wheel being created in LibreOffice Calc

Regina Henschel writes:

Susanne Mohn asked on the German-language user’s mailing list how to create a colour wheel with LibreOffice. It was not about the colours themselves, but about the geometry. How do you create a circle or ring with equally sized sectors?

Very different solutions were proposed. Susanne Mohn, Harald Berger and I (Regina Henschel) have created a page in the LibreOffice Wiki so that these do not remain hidden in a thread. Due to the development process, some sample files are in German, but the page itself is in English.

Colour wheels can be used to create “doughnut charts” of data. Have fun exploring!

Colour wheel


Wednesday
11 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-11 Wednesday

21:00 UTC

face
  • Up, mail chew, breakfast, to the OFE venue with Ludovic, met lots of interesting people, had a fine lunch together; encouraging talks about Poland and FLOSS.
  • Published the next strip around why Dammit did it: building open-roads. Back in the land of software strange things happen; eg. it was rumoured that the cost of the auxiliary Windows PCs, and Office licenses made it cheaper for Sun Microsystems to buy StarDivision and open-source OpenOffice.org than the alternative; thanks to Simon Phipps for the pointer.
    The Open Road to Freedom - strip#21 - why Dammit did it ?
  • To the airport, worked away on the plane.

face

The Document Foundation and LibreOffice support the international campaign @endof10 https://endof10.org/

The countdown has begun. On 14 October 2025, Microsoft will end support for Windows 10. This will leave millions of users and organisations with a difficult choice: should they upgrade to Windows 11, or completely rethink their work environment?

The good news? You don’t have to follow Microsoft’s upgrade path. There is a better option that puts control back in the hands of users, institutions, and public bodies: Linux and LibreOffice. Together, these two programmes offer a powerful, privacy-friendly and future-proof alternative to the Windows + Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

The real costs of switching to Windows 11

The move to Windows 11 isn’t just about security updates. It increases dependence on Microsoft through aggressive cloud integration, forcing users to adopt Microsoft accounts and services. It also leads to higher costs due to subscription and licensing models, and reduces control over how your computer works and how your data is managed. Furthermore, new hardware requirements will render millions of perfectly good PCs obsolete.

This is a turning point. It is not just a milestone in a product’s life cycle. It is a crossroads.

The new path: Linux + LibreOffice

These two programmes form the backbone of a free and open computing environment based on open standards. For individual users, public administrations, schools and businesses, this combination offers more than enough: it is mature and secure, and is already in use worldwide for mission-critical workloads. Furthermore, using open standards protects users against any attempts by software developers to control them.

Here’s what this alternative offers:

  1. A modern, stable and unrestricted operating system, accessible to all users thanks to intuitive distributions that allow each user to choose the configuration that best suits their needs. It also offers regular updates, long-term support versions and communities where people can help each other and develop their digital knowledge together.
    Unlike Windows 11, Linux works with all personal computers that ran Windows 10, meaning there is no need to replace your old PC. Those with even older computers can also find a suitable version of Linux, extending their useful life and reducing electronic waste.
  2. LibreOffice is a complete office suite offering word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, drawing and database tools. It respects freedom and data because it is based on an open, standard document format (ODF), and is compatible with Microsoft’s proprietary formats (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX). This gives users control, as Microsoft cannot decide to end support at any time, as it is doing with Windows 10.
    LibreOffice is supported by a global community of volunteers, consultants, and companies who provide free and paid professional support, ensuring the ongoing development of the software and the prompt resolution of security and operational issues. There are no licence fees, telemetry or vendor lock-in.
  3. Both Linux and LibreOffice are based on transparency. This means that all documents saved in the standard format will always be available because the format is open, and all

Tuesday
10 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-10 Tuesday

21:00 UTC

face
  • Up earlyish, off to the venue - talks all day about various aspects of commercial open-source; encouraging.

face

General Activities

  1. LibreOffice 24.8.7 was announced on May 8
  2. Olivier Hallot (TDF) added a help page for Page Layout, expanded help for paragraph justification, updated menu paths in Help, added help pages for newly-added Calc functions and of-pie charts, updated help for Business cards and Labels, improved extended tooltips and error messages for Manage Names dialog, corrected an example spreadsheet used for Calc Data Statistics help and improved help for IsNull BASIC function among many other Help cleanups and updates
  3. Gábor Kelemen (allotropia) did many code cleanups
  4. Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) continued polishing support for embedded fonts in PowerPoint files and fixed unexpected changing of background images upon saving and reloading in Draw
  5. Darshan Upadhyay, Szymon Kłos, Michael Meeks and Jaume Pujantell (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online. Szymon also implemented saving checkbox state to XLSX files
  6. Gökay Şatır (Collabora) fixed an issue in Draw with connector text disappearing when “Adjust to contour” option was active
  7. Marco Cecchetti (Collabora) added a feature to select colour palettes for chart data series
  8. Pranam Lashkari (Collabora) fixed an issue with unwanted expansion of reference mark fields after insertion and typing
  9. Miklós Vajna (Collabora) continued improving the handling of tracked changes that depend on each other
  10. Xisco Faulí (TDF) implemented new Calc functions TEXTSPLIT, TEXTBEFORE and TEXTAFTER, made it so glue points in PowerPoint shapes are imported, fixed an issue with connectors in PPTX files becoming misaligned due to negative rotation, added some new automated tests, upgraded many dependencies, fixed crashes and did many code cleanups and optimisations
  11. Michael Stahl (allotropia) worked on multi-user editing based on a conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT) leveraging yrs, a Rust port of Yjs
  12. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) fixed an error when accessing cells via BASIC methods after deleting cells with the RemoveRange method, made it so BASIC’s Time() function returns a Date type, greatly improved the loading time of Writer documents with lots of bookmarks and lots of tables, made it so empty Writer paragraphs correctly follow proportional line spacing smaller than 100%, fixed an issue preventing the export of Draw / Impress documents to SVG from Basic IDE context, improved BASIC error messages, fixed incorrect width in SVG text with “fit-to-size” attribute, fixed an issue with macros not pausing for the duration of executing dialogs and helped Heiko with the new Welcome dialog
  13. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) fixed an issue with expanding the list of events in the Events tab of Customize dialog, fixed crashes and many issues found by static analysers and did code cleanups and optimisations
  14. Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on the WASM build. He also adapted the code to compiler changes and did code cleanups
  15. Noel Grandin (Collabora) improved the loading speed of XLSX files with lots of customFormat attributes in rows, dramatically improved the rendering speed of documents with large page fills when hardware acceleration is used, greatly improved the loading speed of XLSX files with lots of formulas, conditional formatting and comments and improved

face

TDF Annual Report 2024 banner

LibreOffice stands out as a privacy-respecting open source office suite. Unlike proprietary alternatives, the software is designed with privacy, user control and transparency in mind.

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2024 – we’ll post the full version here soon.)

Introduction

Concerns about end user privacy in the digital world have grown significantly over the past two decades, with and increasing awareness of data collection, user tracking and online surveillance. Many proprietary applications, including office productivity tools, often collect vast amounts of user data, in most cases without clear user consent.

All this has been clearly documented by Shoshanna Zuboff in her book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which is defined as a new economic strategy that uses the activities and experience of the individual as a free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, profiling and selling.

In this context, open source software differs substantially because respect for the user and for privacy are part of the ethical principles that guide the development of all applications. And LibreOffice stands out as the only office suite – open source or not – that respects privacy. Unlike proprietary alternatives, LibreOffice is designed with privacy, transparency, and user control of content in mind. The software does not collect telemetry data by default, does not include intrusive tracking functions, and allows users to work completely offline.

The following is a list of LibreOffice features and settings which help ensure end-user privacy, making the software a preferred choice for individuals, businesses and government institutions that prioritise data security.

No data collection or telemetry by default

Infographic showing that LibreOffice doesn't mine your data

One of the most significant privacy benefits of LibreOffice is its lack of telemetry by default. Unlike proprietary office suites that constantly send usage data back to their developers, LibreOffice does not collect or send any personal data without the user’s consent.

  1. There are no background processes that track document usage, keystrokes or user activity.
  2. LibreOffice does not create a unique user ID or track document interactions like some proprietary office suites do.
  3. There is no built-in cloud storage requirement, ensuring that files remain on the user’s device unless manually uploaded elsewhere.

Optional telemetry with user consent

LibreOffice offers an optional telemetry feature, but it is entirely opt-in and requires explicit user consent. The collected data will only be used to improve the functionality of the software and will never be shared with third parties.

Full offline functionality

Unlike cloud-based office suites such as Google Docs, Microsoft 365 or Apple iWork, LibreOffice is a fully offline suite.

  1. No forced cloud storage: documents remain on the local computer, reducing the risk of unauthorised access.
  2. No dependence on an Internet connection: users can work in completely isolated environments.
  3. No third-party server involvement: documents are never stored on a corporate server unless explicitly uploaded by the user.

For security-conscious organisations such as government agencies, law firms and healthcare providers, this offline capability ensures that sensitive documents never leave the internal network.

Open Document Format (ODF


Monday
09 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-09 Monday

21:00 UTC

face
  • Up early, mail chew - lots of COOL Days backlog still, admin. Packed, lunch, set off to Warsaw for the APELL conference.
  • Some hacking on the pane! too fun.

Sunday
08 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-08 Sunday

21:00 UTC

face
  • Up early, communion service in the morning, home for a pizza lunch; watched The Accountant 2 with J. and dropped E. into & out of Cambridge. Caught up with M&D.

Saturday
07 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-07 Saturday

21:00 UTC

face
  • Up lateish, catch up with E. David over briefly for lunch, and some fixing / re-routing / plugging of a shelf for his church.
  • Picked up J. from Cambridge, F&C dinner with E. Lovely to see her.

Friday
06 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-06 Friday

21:00 UTC

face
  • Catch up with set of partners, Dave, Mike, Tracie. J. off to see N. and then on to drop a car with M. & spend some time with her.
  • Lots of mail catch-up, dinner with E. and dropped H. in to Lucy Cavendish in the middle; watched with E. picked H. up again rather late.

face

With LibreOffice 24.8 close to end of life, all users are invited to update their free office suite to the latest release

Berlin, 6 June 2025 – The Document Foundation is pleased to announce the release of LibreOffice 25.2.4, the fourth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 25.2 family for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), MacOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Linux, available for download at https://www.libreoffice.org/download [1].

With LibreOffice 24.8 approaching the end of life, this release – which includes dozens of fixes and enhancements that further improve the suite’s performance, reliability and interoperability – is ready for production environments. We invite all users to update their installation as soon as possible.

LibreOffice 25.2.4 is based on the LibreOffice Technology, which enables the development of desktop, mobile and cloud versions – either from TDF or from the ecosystem – that fully support the two ISO standards for document formats: the open ODF or Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and ODP) and the closed and proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX).

Products based on the LibreOffice Technology are available for all major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud.

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF recommends a LibreOffice Enterprise optimized version from one of the ecosystem companies, with dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLAs and security patch backports for three to five years.

English manuals for LibreOffice 25.2 Write, Impress, Draw and Math are available for download at https://books.libreoffice.org/en/. End users can get first-level technical support from volunteers on the user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org.

Downloading LibreOffice

All available versions of LibreOffice for the desktop can be downloaded from the same website: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/.

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

[1] Fixes in RC1: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/25.2.4/RC1. Fixes in RC2: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/25.2.4/RC2. Fixes in RC3: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/25.2.4/RC3.


Thursday
05 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-05 Thursday

21:00 UTC

face
  • Up early, staff / team workshops - various updates. Communication game, BOF / brain-storming sessions, and feedback. Fun!
  • Back to the airport with piles of baggage and Laser, Skyler & Tracie - extraordinary taxi-driver archetype. Uneventful flight, home eventually.
  • Lovely to see J. H. and E. all together; fine.

Wednesday
04 June, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-06-04 Wednesday

21:00 UTC

face
  • Lots of good talks all day from partners, staff, community, amazing things being done left & right.
  • Good to catch up with lots of people 1:1. Fine dinner and various games in the evening - fun.

face

Month of LibreOffice stickers

At the beginning of May, we began a new Month of LibreOffice campaign, celebrating community contributions all across the project. We do these every six months – so how many people got sticker packs this time? Check it out…

This is a huge increase over the last campaign, in November, which had 301 winners. So that’s fantastic work, everyone! Hundreds of people, all across the globe, have helped out in our projects and communities. And those are just community contributions, not including the hundreds more from our ecosystem and certified developers!

We’re hugely thankful for the work – and, of course, everyone who’s listed on the wiki page can get a sticker pack, with the stickers shown above.

How to claim

If you see your name (or username) on this page, get in touch! Email mike.saunders@documentfoundation.org with:

  • your name (or username) from the wiki page
  • and your postal address

…and we’ll send you a bunch of stickers for your PC, laptop and other kit. (Note: your address will only be used to post the stickers, and will be deleted immediately afterwards.) If you contributed to the project in May but you’re not on the wiki page, please let us know what you did, so that we can add you!

There is one more thing…

And we have an extra bonus: ten contributors have also been selected at random to get an extra piece of merchandise – a LibreOffice hoodie, T-shirt, rucksack or snazzy glass mug. Here are the winners (names or usernames) – we’ll get in touch personally with the details:

  • Takenori Yasuda
  • koyotak
  • Andrew Kopf
  • HiTom
  • bantoniof
  • Dominick
  • Jeremy Norvell
  • skyandrews
  • Johan van der Knijff
  • Yashodhan Sawardekar

Congratulations to all the winners, and a big thanks once again to everyone who took part – your contributions keep the LibreOffice project strong. We plan to have another Month of LibreOffice in November, but everyone is welcome to see what they can do for LibreOffice at any time!


Tuesday
03 June, 2025


face

Xisco Fauli, Ilmari Lauhakangas and Mike Saunders from The Document Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind LibreOffice, discuss Quality Assurance (QA) in free and open source software . (This video is also available on PeerTube.)

Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.

YouTube privacy policy

If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh.


Monday
02 June, 2025


face

Writer has some support for interdependent (or hierarchical) tracked changes: e.g. the case when you have a delete on top of an insert. While there were some working cases, handling of many combinations were missing. I started to make systematic improvements in this area in the recent past, this post gives you an overview what's done so far.

This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.

Motivation

DOCX files in Word can often have overlapping tracked changes: Writer tries to split these up to make sure there is only one tracked change under the cursor at the same time. Still, it's possible that you have a tracked change with multiple types: e.g. a delete on top of an insert.

The focus in on 3 combinations which appear in DOCX files a lot: "insert, then delete", "insert, then format" and "delete, then format".

This mostly affects the UI and import/export filters of ODT and DOCX.

Results so far

Given an insert, then delete:

Interdependent tracked change: insert, then delete

Most operations worked nicely here, but in case your cursor was in the middle of AAA and you did a reject, followed by an undo, proper handling of that was missing, now implemented.

But then given an insert, then a format:

Interdependent tracked change: insert, then format

Then a handling of more actions were missing:

  1. DOCX import is now implemented.
  2. ODT import is now implemented.
  3. Accepting when you're inside AAA is now implemented: the insert is accepted for BBB but the format stays unchanged.
  4. Rejecting when you're inside AAA is now implemented: the insert is rejected and BBB is also removed, together with the format on top of it.
  5. Accepting the BBB now correctly operates on the insert type, so the format type remains after accept.
  6. If you accept BBB, now the surrounding AAA and CCC also get accepted as well, as expected.
  7. Now if you reject BBB, then it gets removed from the document, since you rejected an insert.
  8. When you reject BBB, the surrounding AAA and CCC also get rejected.

The combined implementation of these should give you a smooth feeling in case you're used to how Word works: if there is a format redline combined with an insert, then the operations act on the insert type, and format is only accepted/rejected when there is no insert "under" the format.

Similarly: it's a bit of an implementation detail that Writer splits redlines on DOCX import: so if you e.g. accept AAA then we combine that with BBB and CCC when it makes sense, so you need to click a lot less.

Finally, given a delete, then a format:

Interdependent tracked change: delete, then format

Then again handling of some actions were missing:

  1. DOCX import is now implemented.
  2. ODT import is now implemented.
  3. ODT export is now implemented.
  4. Accepting AAA now correctly operates on the delete type of BBB.
  5. Rejecting AAA

face

Brazilian LibreOffice Community at FLISOL Brasilia 2025

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 May with a new Month of LibreOffice campaign! This is something we do every six months, to say thank you to contributors and encourage more people to join our project. We’ll post the final results here very soon…

Month of LibreOffice banner

LibreOffice guidebook covers

Brazilian LibreOffice Community at FLISOL Brasilia 2025

  • This year’s LibreOffice Conference will take place in Budapest from 4 – 6 September, and the call for papers is now open. Submit a talk, and we hope to seeing you there!

Photo of Budapest at night

  • On May 8, we announced LibreOffice 24.8.7, the seventh and last minor release of the LibreOffice 24.8 family. After this, all users are strongly recommended to upgrade to the LibreOffice 25.2 branch.

LibreOffice 24.8 banner

Open Document Format logo

GSoC logo

Keep in touch – follow us on Mastodon, Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter), Reddit and Facebook. Like what we do? Support our community with a donation – or join our community and help to make LibreOffice even better!


Wednesday
28 May, 2025


face

This deal unites the largest team of corporate Office engineers to deliver on Collabora Productivity’s mission to restore Digital Sovereignty to its users, while making Open Source Office Rock. It supercharges Collabora’s Online Office products and services portfolio with rich German language capability, deeper experience of vertical applications, new Web Assembly skills, and a wider unified partner ecosystem. Through improved product richness this sharpens the competitive edge of FLOSS Office productivity against mass-market proprietary alternatives.

CAMBRIDGE, UK – May 28th 12:00 CEST – 2025

Collabora Productivity, the world’s leading provider of collaborative Open Source Office editors have completed a merger with allotropia. Collabora has invested heavily in building Collabora Online (COOL) – a market leading, on-premise, secure, interoperable, open-source solution for document editing and collaboration deployed to any modern browser. This is complemented by desktop and mobile apps across Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Chrome-OS. Collabora provides support subscriptions to enterprise customers worldwide via a network of hundreds of trusted partners. This is now augmented by allotropia’s partner and customer base. Together with our partners we deliver document and productivity excellence integrated with our partners product and service offerings.

allotropia’s expertise around Web Assembly combined with Collabora Online will we expect, in time, enable customer use-cases such as well as office-as-component embedding scenarios in vertical applications as well as off-line and end-to-end encrypted editing, and. This work builds on some visionary prototype funding from the Bundesministerium des Inneren (BMI) for a collaboration between the companies to enable the use of Collabora Online off-line in the browser.

Further details of product investment, and direction will be announced and decided in workshops with our key customers and partners at our annual COOL Days conference in Budapest next week where staff, community and our customer and partner-ecosystem meet, swap ideas, and hear about the latest work in our upcoming major release featuring improved performance, usability, interoperability and much more.

“Collabora is excited to welcome each member of the allotropia team today!” said Michael Meeks, CEO, Collabora Productivity, “We are excited to work together to accelerate our product development, enjoy our first COOL Days together, and plan the next features and possibilities to delight our customers.”

Collabora has invested in building a network of hundreds of partners and is approaching one hundred million docker image downloads of its document editing server software, with millions of paying users of its products, all of whom will start to benefit from this merger from today.We expect to bring the experience that allotropia has from it’s relationship with CIB around vertical desktop applications (Fachverfahren) to help partners and customers migrate their Windows & Microsoft Office based business process to easy to deploy multi-platform web applications.

“With our awesome team of engineers, and our WebAssembly know how, we can add significantly to Collabora’s powerhouse of Office engineering prowess & their product offerings”, says Thorsten Behrens, CEO of allotropia, “we’ve worked with them as partners for many years, and align perfectly in our goals

Older blog entries ->