The LibreOffice Conference 2026 will take place in Pordenone, Italy, from September 10 – 12. And now the schedule is online, with:

• 8 conference tracks
• 64 sessions
• 49 speakers

Click here to view the schedule

This is the second part of our interview with the Bundesheer (see here for the first).

At the LibreOffice Conference 2025, you showcased the new LibreOffice features sponsored by the Austrian Armed Forces. How did that come about?

From the very beginning, we clearly recognised the need to further develop LibreOffice. Before finalising our plans, we also examined how we could continue to develop the product. Ultimately, we issued a Europe-wide, open call for proposals to secure both support and development capacity for LibreOffice. The way we selected the product enhancements stemmed in part from this preliminary study, because we had identified specific import capabilities and compatibility requirements.

That’s one major aspect: improving interoperability in line with our needs. The other focus was on improving LibreOffice based on ongoing user feedback and feedback regarding collaboration with external organizations. One example of this was the “Notes” bar in Impress. In the past, users had to edit notes in a separate notes view.

We were told very early on that users wanted to be able to do this directly within the slide editing view. This is a very well-known enhancement that we sponsored, which – I think – works very well. In addition, there are many other details, such as scrolling through presentations with the mouse wheel. Previously, you had to keep switching back and forth to the slide overview view to scroll. Now all of this is possible right from within the slide, which simply makes it easier to use and also increases acceptance because users expect it.

I could list many more extensions. We’re not the only ones contributing a great deal to LibreOffice – we see ourselves as part of the community, and we’re happy when the community uses our contributions and when others contribute their own, which we’re of course very happy to use as well. That’s what makes the project so attractive and successful.

Features and improvements in LibreOffice, sponsored by the Austrian Military (this is a slide from a presentation at the LibreOffice Conference 2025)

Have you also developed external extensions?

We’ve developed extensions for internal use, but there are also several publicly available extensions. One of them integrates our own help page, since we provide targeted help within our internal systems.

On a much larger scale, there’s an extension hosted on GitHub that covers military-tactical symbols. It’s available as open source software, so anyone can use it. This is actually an extension that, although it’s still in “release candidate” status, already works well. The extension is, of course, also suitable for collaboration with other armies. Its functionality is unique. To my knowledge, it’s not available anywhere else.

Do you also use the Open Document Format internally?

Yes – one of the advantages of LibreOffice is that the format is ISO-standardised and truly open. You get the best functionality in LibreOffice when you use ODF. We use ODF throughout. It’s clear that our external partners don’t do this …

Many government departments around the world are moving away from vendor lock-in by tech giants, and switching to free and open source software like LibreOffice. This helps with privacy, security, and digital sovereignty. One such example is the Austrian Military (Bundesheer), which has moved 16,000 PCs from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. We talked to them, to find out why and how they did it…

When did all of this start? When were the first decisions made?

It began in 2020, with the trend toward running software increasingly in the cloud and less on-premises on devices within companies. At that time, we examined what guarantees existed for running software – specifically Microsoft Office – directly in the workplace without any cloud connection. So the review and preparation began in 2020.

In late 2022 and early 2023, the decision was made to switch to LibreOffice. The goals were to ensure that data never leaves the company and that the Office applications can be used without external dependencies.

Who made the decision?

The decision was structured in such a way that our “corporate leadership” – that is, the Federal Ministry of Defence – could decide, based on the information compiled regarding future software development and cloud dependencies, that we would switch to LibreOffice.

It was actually decided by the Federal Minister’s cabinet and the relevant departments – so at the very top.

Did you create a “timeline” at the beginning – something like “Y should happen by X” and so on?

After we received the assignment, we carried out the planning to determine how the transition could take place and what needed to happen. The plan included, from an early stage, that we would guide our users to LibreOffice in a timely manner, partly by installing LibreOffice at the user’s request. That is, we made it available, and the users who wanted it could have it installed.

We saw very high adoption rates – not 100%, but about half.

Half of 16,000?

Yes. And the next step we planned was to make its use mandatory, because it’s crucial not only to announce that something new is coming but also to require its use so that people have to start working with the tool early on. Of course, switching from an Office suite that’s been used in the company for over 30 years to a completely new product – even if it looks similar but behaves differently – requires practice.

That’s why we specifically made the use of LibreOffice mandatory in selected services. And we did this as early as 2023, so that users could get familiar with it well in advance. This gave users time to tailor the transition to their own needs and prepare for it, and we didn’t just flip the switch all at once with a “big bang.” The change was announced over the course of several years.

Finally, in December 2024, the use of LibreOffice became mandatory for internal collaboration. This meant we actually provided several years of preparation time …

A truly open document format requires free public availability, royalty-free standards, and no usage restrictions.

Organizations like the Open Knowledge Foundation and the European Union use several core rules to guarantee long-term data access, system independence, and freedom from single-vendor control.

Core Openness Criteria

• Public Specification: The complete format rules are published and easy for anyone to access.
• Royalty-Free: Patents or licensing fees cannot block developers from building compatible software.
• No Discrimination: Anyone can use the format for any purpose without needing special permission.
• Independent Control: A transparent, non-profit standards body manages future updates.

Recognized Frameworks

• The Open Definition: Specifies exact legal and technical terms for open works.
• European Interoperability Framework (EIF): Requires governments to use truly open formats for public documents.

Comparison of ODF and OOXML

When evaluated against the strict criteria for open formats, Open Document Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOXML) take fundamentally different approaches.

While both are recognized as official ISO standards, ODF fully satisfies the open standard criteria by design, whereas OOXML features structural and legal complexities that often limit true open implementation.

Comparison Table

Key Openness Differences

Public Specification & Transparency

• ODF: Conceived from the beginning to be a modern, clean XML specification. “ODF is the only openly available standard, published fully in a document that is freely available and easy to comprehend”, as noted by GranneBlog: https://blog.granneman.com/2009/02/06/odf-compared-constrasted-with-ooxml/
• OOXML: Designed primarily to map Microsoft Office’s old binary data into XML. It is split into Strict and Transitional variants. “Transitional is everything else: a vast catalogue of compatibility features, deprecated elements, platform-specific behaviours, and references to undocumented quirks of Microsoft Office versions from the 1990s.”, as noted by the TDF Blog: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/06/02/a-standard-in-name-only/

Legal & Intellectual Property Rules

• ODF: Utilizes a standard open-source framework. Anyone can implement ODF in a project without fearing intellectual property or patent litigation.
• OOXML: Relies on the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (OSP): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Open_Specification_Promise. The OSP is a unilateral covenant not to sue, but it only covers developers to the extent that they precisely mirror the specification. Any implementation-defined deviations or edge cases may leave developers legally unprotected.

Technical Discrimination & System Control

• ODF: Avoids hardware-specific dependencies, ensuring that independent applications (like LibreOffice or Apache OpenOffice) can render the data uniformly.
• OOXML: Contains platform-specific elements tied closely to the Windows OS ecosystem. Because Microsoft Office …

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 had one update in July: LibreOffice 26.2.5, the fifth maintenance update to the LibreOffice 26.2 branch.

• We also said a big welcome to our new TDF members! Members – more formally known as the “Board of Trustees” – are a crucial part of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. They are people from across the globe who contribute time, effort and skills, whether on a voluntary or paid basis.

• Then there was another section from the TDF Annual Report 2025, Policy and Digital Sovereignty. This section looks at Germany’s IT Planning Council committing to ODF, the approval of ODF 1.4, and public migrations to LibreOffice.

• On a similar topic, we posted how proprietary formats have become Microsoft’s main tool for lock-in.

• Back to the software itself: we posted the LibreOffice State of the Project (July 2025 – June 2026), based on data from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026, extracted from the LibreOffice dashboard and the Matomo repository. This is full of statistics describing the health of the project and the community.

• An additional section from TDF’s Annual Report 2025 was the foundation’s financials and budget.

• Meanwhile, the small team at TDF is expanding, with a job offer for a new Marketing and Communication Professional. Applications are open until the end of August.

• Finally, we wrapped up the month discussing Microsoft’s end-of-life of Office 2021, and how LibreOffice stays yours for a lifetime. And on a similar topic, we looked at why OOXML-based suites handle ODF badly.

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

On 30 July 2026, the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published Open Source Software: Security Principles and Practices, a 31-page guidance document for federal civilian agencies. It is available at no cost and marked TLP:CLEAR, meaning it may be shared without restriction.

The document is addressed to US federal agencies, and it fulfils obligations under two executive orders on federal cybersecurity. It covers four areas: using open source solutions, contributing to open source projects, producing open source software, and evaluating open source artificial intelligence models. The observations below concern the first three.

Its analytical content is not jurisdiction-specific, and public administrations elsewhere — including in Europe — will find that it articulates, in the vocabulary of risk management, several positions that the open source community has been arguing for two decades.

What the guidance actually says

The central claim is more precise than the headlines suggest. CISA does not assert that open source software is more secure than proprietary software. It states that OSS is “no more or less risky than other software,” and locates the difference elsewhere: with open source, an organisation can assess code quality and security directly, rather than relying solely on vendor assurances.

This is a claim about verifiability, not about defect rates. It is also the more defensible claim, and the more consequential one for procurement. An agency evaluating proprietary software is evaluating a vendor’s statement about its own product. An agency evaluating open source software is evaluating the product.

The guidance draws the corollary explicitly. Among the benefits it lists for federal agencies is reduced vendor lock-in: open standards and modifiable code, CISA writes, protect agencies from “proprietary dependency traps.” A national cybersecurity authority has placed lock-in inside a security document rather than a competition-policy one. That is a meaningful shift in where this argument is permitted to live.

The C4 Framework

The most practically useful part of the guidance is Appendix A, which sets out the C4 Framework for assessing whether an open source project is trustworthy. Its premise is that, because contributors may be pseudonymous and are bound by no delivery obligation, trustworthiness cannot be assessed from who produced the software. It must be assessed from how the software was produced — which open source development makes visible in a way that closed development does not.

C4 groups the evidence into four categories:

• Codebase — commit recency, known vulnerabilities, dependency currency.
• Community — number of maintainers, institutional structure, whether the project sits within a foundation.
• Conduct — whether there is a vulnerability disclosure policy, whether code review is required, whether maintainers merge their own commits, the licence, the code of conduct.
• Configuration — whether defaults are secure, and what hardening the software supports.

The framework is applied in five steps: identify measurable criteria, determine risk tolerance and weight the criteria, collect observations (with automated tooling where available), evaluate against each criterion, and compare the result to the tolerance.

We would encourage public administrations to apply this framework to LibreOffice. Every category can be answered from …

LibreOffice extensions are optional, third-party addons for the suite, that add extra functionality. Bora Yarkın has been working on a new extension for LibreOffice Impress, so let’s hear from him about it…

Tell us about it!

The extension lets you control a LibreOffice Impress presentation from your phone or any other device with a modern web browser.

When you start the remote, LibreOffice displays a QR code. Scan it with your phone and the presentation starts from the first slide. The phone interface then shows the current slide, presenter notes, elapsed time and navigation controls.

I tried to make the process as simple as possible: no separate mobile application and no manual pairing codes.

The remote can be opened from the Slide Show menu in LibreOffice’s top application menu bar—the menu alongside File, Edit, View and the other main menus.

This should not be confused with the Slide Show tab inside LibreOffice’s Tabbed user interface. LibreOffice’s UNO extension API does not currently let me add commands to that built-in tab. When using the Tabbed interface, the remote commands are therefore available under the Extensions tab instead.

The extension currently provides several connection modes:

• Local network: The phone connects directly to the computer running LibreOffice through its local IPv4 address. This is the main mode and the one I have tested most thoroughly.
• Direct IPv6: Works similarly, but uses an IPv6 connection. It is still marked experimental because my home internet connection is currently the only IPv6 network I can properly test with.
• Relay server: A small Python service that can be hosted on Linux or Windows. It is useful when the phone and computer are on different networks or when direct connections are blocked by carrier-grade NAT, firewalls or other network restrictions. It also supports multiple connections, so an organisation can host one relay server on its own infrastructure.
• LocalTunnel: An experimental fallback that creates an outbound connection through the LocalTunnel service. I consider this a last-resort option when the other connection methods are unavailable.

The compatible relay-server package is bundled with the extension. It can be downloaded or extracted directly from the Remote Settings window by selecting “Get Relay Server”. The package includes the required documentation and setup instructions.

To install the extension, download the .oxt file from the LibreOffice Extensions website or GitHub and open it with LibreOffice. It can also be installed manually through Tools > Extensions. After installation, restart LibreOffice if requested.

The extension includes translations for more than 100 languages and automatically follows LibreOffice’s interface language. English and Turkish are the two languages I have personally checked. Many of the other translations were created with ChatGPT, so I cannot guarantee their quality and would be very grateful for corrections from native speakers.

Why did you create it, and what was the process like?

The original inspiration came from Apple Keynote.

When Keynote is installed on both a Mac and an iPhone, the phone can be used to control the …

Today we’re talking to Karl-Heinz Gruner, who has been supporting the LibreOffice community at events in Germany and recently became a member of The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind the suite:

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in Middle Franconia, near Nuremberg. In my spare time, I enjoy riding my motorbike, even though I haven’t been getting out on rides as much as I’d like at the moment. I find hiking in the region a great way to unwind. Being active in the fresh air brings me peace and relaxation, whilst also giving me space to come up with new ideas.

Professionally, I have worked extensively with office applications from various manufacturers – both from a user’s perspective and in the context of supporting other users. A particular focus of my involvement is my work with the local Linux User Group. There, I focus on open-source software solutions, sharing experiences and imparting practical knowledge.

For what are you using LibreOffice right now?

My personal curiosity and interest in practical IT solutions prompted me to carry out a fundamental modernisation of an association’s accounting system.

The starting point was an outdated spreadsheet program that was used to create entries, reports and statements. Initially, the idea was to migrate this solution to LibreOffice Calc, making it clearer and more future-proof.

However, during the analysis, it became clear that simply revising the existing spreadsheets would not be sufficient. Consequently, the decision was made to switch to a more up-to-date system with more comprehensive functions within the existing IT environment. A key outcome of this process is the use of a comprehensive application for administration and communication.

In addition to this, I developed a training programme for the adult education centre to focus on a specific area: the professional design of documents using forms and mail merges.

What do you plan to do in the future?

Looking to the future, I believe it is particularly important to convey information through a variety of channels. Modern software offers a wide range of functions, which many users initially find difficult to get to grips with.

It is therefore crucial to break down reservations and barriers to access. Potential users should be provided with clear information, given practical support and encouraged to try things out for themselves. Software and digital services must remain not only functional but also appealing.

For me, this means continuing to share knowledge through talks and training sessions, explaining practical applications using concrete examples, and convincing users of the benefits of open solutions.

My guiding principle is: inform, provide practical support, and spark interest.

Many thanks to Karl-Heinz for his help! All contributors to LibreOffice are welcome to become members of TDF

The question arises naturally for anyone who chooses the standard format over the proprietary one: why do office suites that use OOXML as their native format handle ODF in ways that range from poor to appalling?

The two most obvious answers are these: vendors have neglected the format, treating it as an afterthought, or they are quietly working to discredit the very idea of transparent interoperability, through support so bad that it demonstrates the format “does not work”.

Both answers are too simplistic. The reality is that three distinct mechanisms are at work, applying to different vendors in different proportions and ultimately converging on the same outcome.

A challenge that is not a challenge

Reading and writing ODF faithfully, in isolation, is genuinely feasible: the format is completely and openly specified, and there is no equivalent of OOXML’s notorious legacy compatibility flags, which refer to undocumented behaviours of old Microsoft products that only Microsoft can reproduce.

A competent development team is able to implement ODF correctly on the basis of the ODF specification alone.

An office suite, however, does not implement a format in isolation: it has an internal, in-memory representation of the document. Loading a document is a mapping into that representation, and saving a document is a mapping out of it.

Fidelity is greatest when the internal model is congruent with the document format. LibreOffice’s model is essentially ODF, which is why, in this context, ODF is genuinely native.

When a suite’s internal model has the shape of OOXML, ODF stops being native and becomes an external import that must be converted to and from a representation built for a different format.

Take an ODF feature that OOXML lacks: the ODP field that displays the total number of slides. The instructive part is that the information itself is not missing from a PPTX file. The package enumerates every slide, and the count is available to any program that opens it. What OOXML provides no way to express is the statement that this number is the total. There is a field for the current slide number and none for the count, and Microsoft’s own guidance is to type the figure into a text box and keep it up to date by hand, which is a precise description of not having a field at all. Every published workaround is a macro or an add-in that computes the number once and writes it out as fixed text.

So when an ODP file carrying that field is opened in an OOXML-based editor, what is lost is not the data but the instruction. The number survives. The fact that it was calculated does not, and from that moment the document no longer knows how long it is.

The reverse direction fails more quietly, and therefore worse. A slide count exported from Impress to PPTX has to be written out as fixed text, so the presentation is correct on the day it is converted and wrong the first time a …

On 13 October 2026, Microsoft ends support for Office 2021. No more security updates, no more fixes, no more assurances. The software will still launch. It will still open your files. But from that date it becomes a liability rather than an asset — and the only sanctioned path forward runs through a subscription.

This is not a bug in the model. It is the model.

Support that does not expire

LibreOffice has no end-of-support date, because there is no vendor with the power to declare one. The code is public. The development is community-driven and foundation-governed. When a release cycle closes, the next one is already available, free, to everyone — not to those who renewed.

The distinction matters more than it appears. Microsoft’s lifecycle policy is a commercial instrument: the date is chosen, not discovered. It marks the moment when continuing to use software you paid for becomes unwise, and it exists to convert perpetual licences into recurring revenue. LibreOffice cannot issue such a date because no one holds the authority to issue it.

Ownership of documents, not just access to them

A support deadline is the visible layer. Underneath it sits something more consequential: the format your documents are written in.

LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument Format (ODF), an ISO standard maintained by OASIS and implemented by multiple independent applications. The specification is public, complete, and readable. Anyone can write software that opens an ODF file correctly — today, or in forty years, using tools that have not yet been written.

OOXML, despite carrying an ISO number, is not comparable in practice. The standard that was approved and the format that Microsoft Office actually writes have diverged. Independent implementations remain approximations. This is why round-tripping a complex document between suites degrades it, and why the degradation is always the fault of the software that did not write the format in the first place.

The consequence is simple. If your archive is in OOXML, your ability to read it depends on a commercial relationship with a single company continuing indefinitely. If your archive is in ODF, it does not.

Documents are software

A modern document is not a page. It is a structured artefact: markup, style definitions, embedded objects, references to fonts, scripts, conditional logic, external data. It is executed by an application in exactly the way a program is executed by a runtime.

We accepted decades ago that critical software should not be built on formats and interfaces controlled by a single vendor. Documents have escaped that scrutiny only because they look like paper. They are not paper. The same argument that makes open standards essential for software makes them essential for the files that record contracts, medical histories, legislation, research, and institutional memory.

Costs that stop compounding

The licence saving is real but it is the least interesting part of the calculation. What changes structurally is the removal of a recurring, unilaterally repriceable line item from the budget — one that has risen repeatedly and will rise again, because the …