So the LibreOffice Conference 2026 comes to an end! Thanks to everyone who joined – and a big round of applause for the organising team, pictured here 
In the coming week, we’ll start editing and posting videos from the event, so stay tuned…
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So the LibreOffice Conference 2026 comes to an end! Thanks to everyone who joined – and a big round of applause for the organising team, pictured here In the coming week, we’ll start editing and posting videos from the event, so stay tuned…
Well, that’s a photo from last night’s community dinner, but now the second day talks are beginning!
As with yesterday, we will be live-streaming most sessions on the schedule (in track rooms 1 and 2) and making recordings of all. Find out more by following our communication channels, where we’ll post the streaming links as we go live:
Here’s LibreOffice’s Engineering Steering Committee having their session:
Yes, the LibreOffice Conference 2026 has started in Pordenone, northern Italy. If you’re attending in-person, we look forward to seeing you!
If you want to attend remotely, we will be live-streaming most sessions on the schedule (in track rooms 1 and 2) and making recordings of all. Find out more by following our communication channels, where we’ll post the streaming links as we go live:
Enjoy the conference, and a big thanks to the organisers for making it happen
If you don't know what is dynamic arrays, then just read this article https://exceljet.net/articles/dynamic-array-formulas-in-excel.
Note, dynamic array's functions like UNIQUE, FILTER, SORT, etc. were already implemented early. But other new general dynamic array features were added to LibreOffice Calc only now into current master that will be 27.2 release in next year.
Let's say big thanks to Collabora's developers for it, because all work was made for Collabora Office and then Xisco Fauli copied all patches to LibreOffice project (The source code license allows it, because it's the same MPL 2.0 on both sides).
You can try the new features using master daily builds for your OS by the link.
This year’s conference starts in two days, in Pordenone, northern Italy – and we’re getting ready. It’s not too late to register and join us!
The Document Foundation is the non-profit organisation that coordinates the LibreOffice community. Anyone who contributes to the project can apply to become a member of the foundation, and join the over 200 existing members. We’ve also partnered with TUXEDO, a laptop vendor based in Germany that offers Linux-powered machines, to offer TDF members a 3% discount. The laptops include LibreOffice, of course, and have the option of a special LibreOffice key.
Annika Litzel from TUXEDO says:
We’re very excited to continue our collaboration with The Document Foundation and LibreOffice! As a manufacturer that has always been committed to Linux and Open Source, supporting projects and communities that help build a free and independent digital ecosystem is especially important to us. With this continued partnership, we want to provide a direct benefit to TDF members while strengthening our shared vision: powerful hardware, Linux, and free software should work seamlessly together – without unnecessary dependencies and with a strong focus on privacy and digital sovereignty. A big thank you to The Document Foundation for their continued trust and for this great collaboration!
Find out more about TUXEDO here, and apply to become a member of TDF on this page.
I’m a member of the Brazilian documentation team, officially since 2017. I spent most of that time working on translation and localisation, but lately I’ve been working more on web design, like the Bookshelf project and the online help update. I’d also worked on translation and localisation in other projects before, like the XOOPS CMS and the Fedora project, where I started as an ambassador back in 2008.
I’m a federal public servant in Brazil, and I’ve taken part in some initiatives to use free software in government, but I don’t make decisions at that level, so there’s little I can do to push the adoption of free software where I work. My personal use and choice of tools leans toward free software whenever there’s a choice, but there aren’t many choices.
The online help update has been getting some attention, and I’ve been able to contribute to modernising it and using standards that are more accessible and responsive, along with a more modern look that has more appeal. We have a weekly meeting in the Brazilian community where we keep up with the team’s efforts, propose new ideas, and adopt workflows that help the project.
One thing that took me a while was getting past the initial barrier to contributing bug reports or submitting code via Git — every organisation has its own way of doing things, and some have more hurdles than others. Once you get past that initial barrier, things get a lot easier.
Our weekly meeting helps a lot with that — we talk regularly, and that goes a long way toward solving problems and bringing members closer together. We’ve had some in-person meetings at events like the conference held in Brasília in 2022 and some hackathons, and we plan to have more of these gatherings, which tend to be quite productive and enjoyable too.
Personally, I’ve been using the suite since it was called StarOffice, when it was pretty much the only really useful office suite for Linux at the turn of the millennium. Then came OpenOffice, which in Brazil ended up being named BrOffice, and finally LibreOffice.
My honest opinion is that it’s the most complete office suite available on the market, and I’m glad it’s an open source tool, which is my preference for any software. These days I use office suites …
We’re gearing up for the LibreOffice Conference 2026 next week in Pordenone, northern Italy – but there are more events in the pipeline too.
At the Open Source Conference Luxembourg 2026, which takes place on October 7, there will be two talks from Florian Effenberger, Executive Director at The Document Foundation, around the topics of LibreOffice:
Keep an eye on the conference website for more details and videos of the talks.
Berlin, 4 September 2026 – The Document Foundation today announced the release of LibreOffice 26.2.6, the sixth maintenance update to the LibreOffice 26.2 branch. Building on the major feature release published on February 4, 2026, this update delivers targeted bug fixes and stability improvements contributed by a global community of developers and QA engineers.
LibreOffice 26.2.6 is available for immediate download at libreoffice.org/download for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
List of fixes in RC1: Releases/26.2.6/RC1. List of fixes in RC2: Releases/26.2.6/RC2.
LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice project with a donation at libreoffice.org/donate.
Q&A — LibreOffice 26.2.6
Q: What is LibreOffice 26.2.6?
LibreOffice 26.2.6 is the sixth maintenance update to the LibreOffice 26.2 branch, released by The Document Foundation on 4 September 2026. It delivers targeted bug fixes and stability improvements over the major feature release published on 4 February 2026.
Q: When was LibreOffice 26.2.6 released?
4 September 2026.
Q: Where can I download LibreOffice 26.2.6?
From https://www.libreoffice.org/download/, for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Q: Which operating systems does LibreOffice 26.2.6 support?
Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Q: What is the next version of LibreOffice after 26.2.6?
The Document Foundation will announce LibreOffice 26.8.1 on 17 September 2026, and LibreOffice 26.2.7 on 29 October 2026.
Q: Where can I find the full list of fixes in LibreOffice 26.2.6?
RC1: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.2.6/RC1 — RC2: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/26.2.6/RC2
Q: Who develops LibreOffice 26.2.6?
A global community of volunteer and professional developers and QA engineers, coordinated by The Document Foundation, the Berlin-based non-profit behind LibreOffice.
Q: How much does LibreOffice 26.2.6 cost?
Nothing — LibreOffice is free and open source software. Users and advocates can support the project with a donation at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.
One of the comments on the announcement of LibreOffice 26.8 was a simple question: “So, no AI is now a feature?”
LibreOffice does not reject artificial intelligence out of hand, but an office suite used by tens of millions of people – in schools, hospitals, public bodies, law firms and thousands of other organisations – will not add a feature to its default configuration until that feature can be delivered under the conditions defined by the project in accordance with its principles.
User-controlled execution. The user must be able to choose where inference takes place: on the local computer, on an infrastructure directly controlled by the user, or on a service chosen independently by the user. A default setting that silently redirects to a single provider is not a choice.
No content may leave the computer without authorisation. The content of documents is a user’s asset and, in many implementations, is also legally protected material: medical records, case files, tender documents and student data. Transmission must be the result of a user’s decision and not behaviour carried out in the background by the application.
No telemetry of any kind. LibreOffice does not collect usage data, and this must also apply to AI features.
No dependence on a single provider. An integration that only works with a single company’s API is a lock-in mechanism, regardless of how it is described in the release notes. Interfaces should be open and implementable by multiple backends.
No compromises on format. Generated content must be in ODF format, just like any other content, and must retain its structure, styles and semantics. An assistant that generates documents in a proprietary format perpetuates content lock-in.
Entirely optional. It must be installable, removable, and absent from the user interface for those who do not wish to use it, including administrators deploying the software across thousands of workstations who, due to company policy, do not authorise its use.
Where we stand today
In light of this list, there is no integration that meets all the requirements and that could be deployed, enabled by default, and supported throughout the entire lifecycle of a release. This is an assessment of the current state of the technology and the solutions based on it, and not a judgement on the value of the sector.
In the meantime, users who wish to use AI features can install one of the available extensions, which can be found either on the LibreOffice extensions website or distributed independently. Most connect to a locally running model via Ollama, LM Studio or another OpenAI-compatible endpoint, which means the document never leaves the computer.
These are third-party extensions at various stages of maturity, developed and maintained by their respective authors rather than by The Document Foundation. Users and administrators should assess them as they would any third-party component, checking whether a cloud endpoint is configured and what the provider does with the data it receives. The extension mechanism offers AI functionality to those who want it, without any …
Earlier this year we ran a survey about LibreOffice Base. Similar to the questionnaires about LibreOffice Draw (see first and second blog post) and LibreOffice Calc, we asked about use cases, the most important features, the pain points – and what users expect in the future to support development and to gather ideas how the user interface and workflow can be improved. In total, 455 participants completed the questions. Thanks a lot to everyone who took the time!
As usual, the survey is heavily biased. The attendees self-estimate their expertise above the average, run the application more frequently, and show a different distribution in operating system usage compared to regular users.
To start off, we asked what tools they use. We included Spreadsheet Tools to also cover users who do not actually use a database, but think of a spreadsheet as kind of data storage. Participants responding None, obviously not managing any database, got a different follow-up question.
What tools do you use to manage databases?To trigger the idea of the following open questions, we asked about the importance of different features. Unlike the large number of functions in other modules, Base offers queries, reports, forms, tables, etc. which are all essential for the work with databases. Therefore we collected some features that may or may not be relevant for a sub-group or have room for improvements.
How important are these features for you?People understand the question differently, and reply very short or rather verbosely. The answers may point to a professional environment if “payroll information for up to 10000 people” is mentioned, over SME’s processing order management, production count, and shipment status, to obviously private usage. The following attempt to categorize the answers cannot do justice to the variety of all replies:
For example:
“I use it mostly as place to store sensitive customers data. But since I have small quantities of information, I switched to LibreOffice Calc, which files can be also locked with the password.”
“Smaller business applications in the freight forwarding and logistics sectors, such as fleet management, warehouse management, category management, and invoicing.”
“Managing geospatial information with PostgreSQL/PostGIS and creating reports with the information from the attribute table using LibreOffice Base/Writer.”
“Storing data when it gets too big/slow for a CSV file for personal or internal work (engineering) projects.”
The majority asks for improvements to the user interface with less clutter and a more attractive design. The workflow and user experience should become either simplified or more powerful, depending on the expertise and the scenario …
One week ago, we announced LibreOffice 26.8, our brand new major update. It’s full of new features, and has many improvements to compatibility and performance too. So, what has happened in the week since then? Let’s check out some statistics…
This is the highest number of downloads in the first week of any LibreOffice release! These are just stats from our official downloads page, of course – many Linux users will have acquired the new release via their distribution’s package repositories.
Combining our Mastodon, Bluesky, X/Twitter (not used so much now) and Facebook posts about the announcement, and all the likes, shares, views and comments, we get over 50,000. Thanks to everyone who spread the word on social media!
Our “LibreOffice 26.8 – New Features” video (shown below), has subtitle translations in 32 languages, thanks to our worldwide community, who localised the video on this page. (The video is also available on PeerTube.)
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Many thanks to our worldwide community of volunteers, and certified developers, for all their work on this release
The NotebookBar (NBB) or tabbed interface is an alternative user interface for LibreOffice. In the second part of this series, I explain the way the NotebookBar takes icons and text to create the final output that you see on the screen.
Currently, the NotebookBar is not exactly like the other UI files that in LibreOffice with weld mechanism. In the first part of the series of blog posts on this topic, I discussed the custom widgets in notebookbars and how to edit them using Glade.
The custom widgets rely on C++ code, especially for sizing and other characteristics. For example, Priority Merged Horizontal Box (sfxlo-PriorityMergedHBox) is a “horizontal box hiding children depending on its priorities”. It needs C++ code to implement the priority display of the children. If you search for it in C++ files, you will reach builder.cxx:
$ git grep -l sfxlo-PriorityMergedHBox "*.cxx" vcl/source/window/builder.cxx
The above file is a huge > 100 KB C++ source code that handles NotebookBar custom widgets, but also handles every other VCL widget.
The other parts of the relevant code for the NotebookBar resides in below files. Search for both “Notebookbar” and “notebookbar” in C++ files:
$ git ls-files "*otebook*cxx" sfx2/source/notebookbar/NotebookbarTabControl.cxx sfx2/source/notebookbar/SfxNotebookBar.cxx vcl/qt5/QtInstanceNotebook.cxx vcl/qt6/QtInstanceNotebook.cxx vcl/source/control/NotebookbarPopup.cxx vcl/source/control/notebookbar.cxx vcl/source/window/NotebookBarAddonsMerger.cxx
If you open the NotebookBar UI for LibreOffice Writer or other components like Calc, etc., what you see lacks two important things: icons and text.
Notebookbar widgetsFirst, let’s look into icons. The icon files come from the set of icon themes that are available with LibreOffice. The icon theme of LibreOffice is configurable, therefore you do not see some specific LibreOffice icon in the design. That makes the work of UI designers harder, but lets LibreOffice choose among different icon themes.
You may find more information in the icon-themes/ module README.md file, which describes how to create new icon themes, and how to link the icons to specific icons via .xcu files. For example, in officecfg/registry/data/org/openoffice/Office/UI/CalcCommands.xcu you see:
<node oor:name=".uno:OpenFromCalc" oor:op="replace">
<prop oor:name="Label" oor:type="xs:string">
<value xml:lang="en-US">~Open...</value>
</prop>
<prop oor:name="Properties" oor:type="xs:int">
<value>1</value>
</prop>
</node>
This is defined for the UNO dispatch command, .uno:OpenFromCalc, which opens a file for Calc. The complete list of UNO dispatch commands is available here:
For each command, two icon sizes are created, one small and one big icon. lc_<command name>.png and sc_<command name>.png, if not in SVG format. At first, one should add the icons for a new command to the colibre theme, in order to be usable also with other themes.
Here, the filenames will be lc_openfromcalc.png and sc_openfromcalc.png, which are available …
General Activities LibreOffice 26.2.5 was announced on July 23 Olivier Hallot (TDF) added help pages for many new Calc functions and for matrix input dialog in Math and improved help for regular expressions Alain Romedenne added help for the Python modules scriptforge, msgbox and officehelper Miklós Vajna (Collabora) fixed an
FBSimCity, the explorable isometric city of Firebird internals, is at v0.9.0 — and this one adds the thing the project has been circling since it started. The city has always carried the same caveat: it is a model, it parses no SQL, and no Firebird code runs in your browser. The new machine room is the other thing.The machine roomThe machine room runs the actual Firebird engine: version
Electric Firebird (mariuz/electric-firebird on GitHub) compiles the Firebird database engine to WebAssembly, following the same approach PGlite took for PostgreSQL. The goal is to let Firebird run both server-side (Node.js) and fully client-side in the browser, with no server round-trip required for queries.Highlights:Two backends: a native Node.js implementation (via the Firebird Embedded Server
Correction (added 9 August 2026): the section below headed “A synchronous replica that dies hangs commits” is wrong. Dmitry Sibiryakov pointed this out on firebird-general, and the source confirms it. In src/jrd/replication/Publisher.cpp, checkStatus() is called with canThrow = false on the commit path, so it cannot throw; disable_on_error (default true) instead clears the replicating
Firebird's client library, libfbclient / fbclient.dll, has always been distributed exclusively as a shared library. PR #9104 by Adriano dos Santos Fernandes, merged into the Firebird source tree on July 24, 2026, changes that: it introduces an optional, non-default static archive (libfbclient.a on POSIX, fbclient_static.lib on Windows) for applications that need to link the client library
Big news for anyone using Firebird from Node.js: the pure-JavaScript node-firebird driver shipped eight releases in under a week (v2.6.0 → v2.14.0), completing its entire roadmap and closing all 47 open issues — some dating back to 2015. The driver now stands at feature parity with the best Node.js drivers for Postgres and MySQL, while staying pure JavaScript with zero native
We are excited to announce the release of cl-firebird v1.0.0 — a pure Common Lisp database driver for Firebird 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0+. Featuring full 1:1 feature parity with node-firebird, this release brings 12-factor connection URIs, thread-safe connection pooling, named placeholder parameter binding, custom type parsers (type-cast), streaming cursors, database events (POST_EVENT),
In the past we run several surveys to better understand the use cases for Calc, Impress, Draw, and Writer templates. And since TDF hired a developer for Base it’s time to investigate this module.
We collected a couple of questions that address not only actual users of LibreOffice Base but also people who use other tools or no database at all.
So please participate at https://survey.documentfoundation.org/493555 (expired August/18th).
If you are afraid of the English language either use a translator or let us do it. The more participants we get the better we can steer the development. As usual, we will present the results in this blog.
FBSimCity — the explorable isometric city of Firebird internals — is at v0.4.0, and this release adds a whole backup yard, built around what gbak and nbackup actually do. gbak: the backup that pins your OIT gbak takes a logical backup online: it attaches like any other client and reads every table through a snapshot transaction. That snapshot is the interesting part — it pins
I've published FBSimCity, an interactive visualization of Firebird internals: an explorable isometric city where every building is a subsystem from the classic Conceptual Architecture for Firebird paper (Chan & Yashkir), and queries commute through the pipeline as glowing particles — REMOTE harbor → Y-valve → DSQL → JRD, with the lock manager tower watching over it. The
LibreOffice 26.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2026 ( Check the Release Plan ). LibreOffice 26.8 RC1 is the third pre-release since development of version 26.8 started at the beginning of December, 2025. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 26.8 Beta1, 133 commits have been submitted
General Activities LibreOffice 26.2.4 was announced on June 5 Olivier Hallot (TDF) added a help article for presentation sections, added support for MathML markup in help pages, improved help for Writer’s break submenu and for some Calc functions and updated help after UI changes Adolfo Jayme Barrientos improved strings in
We are thrilled to share the journey of our last 7 releases (from v2.3.3 to v2.6.0), which mark one of the most transformative periods in the history of the node-firebird driver. With this series of releases, we’ve migrated the driver to native TypeScript 7, implemented native Promise & async/await APIs, added support for Firebird 5.0 and 6.0 features,
Not bad for a few days of work , There are still lot's of bugs and UI inconsistencies ps: It's a fork of existing extension but using updated node drivers and updated roadmap (Firebird 6 support / Typescript 6.x)pps: I need to recover my MFA Azure Developer account to publish it soon
Going Native-Free: Introducing the Pure Node.js Wire Driver for Firebird Published in Engineering • Pull Request #168 Summary If you have ever built Node.js applications that communicate with a Firebird database, you are likely familiar with the standard setup routine. Traditionally, high-level drivers depended heavily on the native client library (
LibreOffice 26.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2026 ( Check the Release Plan ). LibreOffice 26.8 Beta1 is the second pre-release since development of version 26.8 started at the beginning of December, 2025. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 26.8 Alpha1, 445 commits have been submitted
IBPhoenix is pleased to announce the release of a new free ebook:Practical Firebird Performance Diagnostics: A Structured ApproachUnlike traditional performance tuning guides, this ebook focuses on the reasoning behind successful diagnostics. It introduces a structured framework that helps Firebird professionals move from observed symptoms to defensible explanations by classifying problems,
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