In 2024, the documentation community continued to update LibreOffice guidebooks, and the Help application

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

New and translated guides

Throughout the year, the documentation project closed the gap between LibreOffice’s major releases, and the updates of the corresponding user guides. By the end of the year, all of the version 24.2 guides were updated to match the release of LibreOffice 24.8, and ready to continue for the forthcoming release – 25.2 – which arrived in February 2025. The goal of tracking the software releases closely was achieved, and the documentation team is now in a steady state of small updates between releases.

The updates and enhancements of the guides were an effort of all of the team, coordinated by Jean Weber (Writer and Getting Started Guide), Olivier Hallot (Calc Guide), Peter Schofield (Impress and Draw guides). A number of volunteers also worked in each guide by writing and reviewing contents and suggesting improvements. Special thanks to Jean Weber for making the guides available for sale in printed format via Lulu Inc.

LibreOffice Help updates

The documentation community also had a team of Help page bug fixes, closing Help documentation bugs, bridging gaps, fixing typos and improving quality, a must-have update to keep LibreOffice in-shape for its user base and documented reference of the application features. A total of 614 Help patches were merged in 2024. The Help pages, which are part of the LibreOffice codebase, were also refactored continuously for better maintenance and code readability. The localisation and translation team of volunteers was quick in flagging typos and English mistakes – while translating the Help content and the user interface.

ScriptForge libraries, and Wiki updates

The documentation community also had a nice contribution from Jean Pierre Ledure, Alain Romedenne and Rafael Lima, for the development of the ScriptForge macro library, in synchronization with the much-needed Help pages on the subject, a practice rarely followed by junior developers of LibreOffice. As we know, undocumented software is software that’s lacking; features that are unknown to the user can be a cause of costly calls to a help desk in corporate deployments. ScriptForge developments came together with their documentation, demonstrating the ScriptForge team’s professional maturity.

LibreOffice Bookshelf

In 2024, the documentation community also updated the LibreOffice Bookshelf – another download page for LibreOffice guides that is different from the current documentation page. The Bookshelf can be cloned and installed in organizations, libraries, colleges and schools, for immediate availability in controlled environments, as well as online reading of the guides. The Open Document Format chapters were transformed into static HTML pages, and are ready to display on computers, tablets and cell phones, bringing LibreOffice user guides closer to its public, anywhere, at any time.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or make a donation. Thank you!

Want to learn new skills for a potential future career change, or expand your knowledge and have fun on the way? Then get involved in the Month of LibreOffice, May 2025! Over the next four weeks, hundreds of people around the world will collaborate to improve the software – and you can help them. There are many ways to get involved, as you’ll see in a second.

And best of all: everyone who contributes to LibreOffice in May can claim a cool sticker pack, and has the chance to win extra LibreOffice merchandise such as mugs, hoodies, T-shirts, rucksacks and more (we’ll choose 10 participants at random at the end):

How to take part

There are many ways you can help out – and you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…

• Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers. We also monitor the users@ mailing list too.

• First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: Go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 11 and LibreOffice 25.2.3”.

• Drum Beater, spreading the word: Tell everyone about LibreOffice on Mastodon, Bluesky or X (Twitter)! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.

• Globetrotter, translating the user interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.

• Code Cruncher, contributing source code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started.

• Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

We’ll be updating this page every few days with usernames across our various services, as people contribute. So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker pack at the end as thanks from us! And who knows, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to win bonus merch as well…

So let’s get going! We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon, Bluesky and X (Twitter) accounts over the next four weeks – stay tuned…

A Milestone for Open Document Formats and Digital Sovereignty

Berlin, 1 May 2025 – Today, The Document Foundation joins the open source software and open standards community in celebrating the 20th anniversary of the ratification of the Open Document Format (ODF) as an OASIS standard. Two decades after its approval in 2005, ODF is the only open standard for office documents, promoting digital independence, interoperability and content transparency worldwide.

Originally created as an XML-based format to enable universal access to documents across platforms and software from multiple vendors, ODF has become a technology policy pillar for governments, educational institutions and organisations that choose open, vendor-independent formats to assert their digital sovereignty.

“ODF is much more than a technical specification: it is a symbol of freedom of choice, support for interoperability and protection of users from the commercial strategies of Big Tech,” said Eliane Domingos, Chairwoman of the Document Foundation. “In a world increasingly dominated by proprietary ecosystems, ODF guarantees users complete control over their content, free from restrictions.”

ODF is the native file format of LibreOffice, the most widely used and well-known open source office suite, and is supported by a wide range of other applications. Its relevance – twenty years after its creation – is a testament to the foresight of its creators and the open source community’s commitment to openness and collaboration.

ODF has been adopted as an official standard by ISO (as ISO/IEC 26300) and by many governments on all continents to support digital sovereignty strategies and public procurement policies to ensure persistent and transparent access to content.

To celebrate this milestone, from today The Document Foundation will be publishing a series of presentations and documents on its blog that illustrate the unique features of ODF, tracing its history from the development and standardisation process through the activities of the Technical Committee for the submission of version 1.3 to ISO and the standardisation of version 1.4.

In addition, representatives from the Document Foundation will participate in open source community events to talk about the Open Document Format and highlight its importance to the FOSS ecosystem. The LibreOffice conference will have an entire track dedicated to ODF, coordinated by the OASIS Technical Committee.

Latest maintenance release brings improved stability and fixes to the powerful free office suite

Berlin, 30 April 2025 – The Document Foundation is pleased to announce the release of LibreOffice 25.2.3, the third maintenance release of the LibreOffice 25.2 family for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), MacOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Linux, which is now available for download at www.libreoffice.org/download [1]. This release includes dozens of bug fixes and compatibility enhancements that further improve the suite’s performance, reliability and interoperability.

LibreOffice 25.2.3 is part of the LibreOffice 25.2 series, which provides a balance of cutting-edge features and production-grade stability. For users requiring a more thoroughly tested version for enterprise environments, the project recommends LibreOffice 24.8.

LibreOffice 25.2.3 is based on the LibreOffice Technology Platform, which enables the development of desktop, mobile and cloud versions – including by companies in the ecosystem – that fully support the two available ISO standards for documents: 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 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 the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners with a wide range of dedicated value-added features and other benefits such as SLAs and security patch backports: www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

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

Downloading LibreOffice

All available versions of LibreOffice can be downloaded from the same website: 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: www.libreoffice.org/donate.

[1] Fixes in RC1: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/25.2.3/RC1. Fixes in RC2: wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/25.2.3/RC2.

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 the month by posting a video from Document Freedom Day celebrations with the Nepalese LibreOffice community. Here it is:

• Then we announced that the LibreOffice Conference 2025 will take place in Budapest on September 1 – 5. We hope you can join us, in-person or taking part remotely! (Photo credit: JStolp on Pixabay)

• In the middle of the month, our Czech community reported back with insights from the Prague InstallFest 2025 Conference.

• We continued to post sections from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report 2024: foundation activities, LibreOffice in 2024 and the LibreOffice Conference.

• Later in April we were present at the Augsburger Linux-InfoDay 2025.

• And finally, we reported on the German government’s IT Planning Council committing to open standards (including ODF) by 2027.

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!

Digital sovereignty is of vital importance for data freedom. If governments and organisations use proprietary or pseudo-standard formats, they limit the tools that citizens can use to access data.

So we’re happy to see that the IT Planning Council in Germany is committing to move to the Open Document Format – a fully standardised format (and the default used in LibreOffice). The German IT Planning Council is a 17-member committee consisting of representatives of Germany’s federal government and the state governments. They say:

Open formats and open interfaces are an important building block for the necessary transformation process of public administration in Germany on the path to greater digital sovereignty and innovation.

The IT Planning Council is committed to ensuring that open formats such as the Open Document Format (ODF) are increasingly used in public administration and become the standard for document exchange by 2027. It is commissioning the Standardization Board to implement this.

More information (in German) on this page. Also see the updates from Schleswig-Holstein moving to LibreOffice.

The LibreOffice Conference is the annual gathering of the community, our end-users, developers, and everyone interested in free office software. In 2024, it took place in Luxembourg

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

This was our third in-person conference after the COVID pandemic, following on from the Milan conference in 2022 and Bucharest conference in 2023, but we also lived-streamed sessions so that participants could watch remotely (and ask questions in our chat channels too).

The conference took place from 10 – 12 October 2024 in Belval, Esch-sur-Alzette, which is around a 20 minute train ride from Luxembourg City. As public transport is free in the whole country, attendees staying in the city didn’t need to buy tickets to attend the event in Belval.

Conference Tracks and extra sessions

Opening sessions were given by Eliane Domingos (chairperson of the Board of Directors at TDF), Serge Linkels (Managing Director of the Digital Learning Hub and 42 Luxembourg), and Stéphanie Obertin (Luxembourg’s Minister for Digitalisation and Minister for Research and Higher Education).

Then there were presentations and talks were given across various “tracks”, or categories: LibreOffice Development; ODF and Interoperability; LibreOffice Design and Accessibility; and LibreOffice Marketing. There were highly technical talks focused on specific areas of LibreOffice and source code, along with more open discussions about community building and recent updates from The Document Foundation.

The conference also had some extra tracks to broaden its scope beyond just LibreOffice, and raise awareness about free and open source software (cybersecurity, EdTech and Open Source Program Office).

A workshop for new developers was held in parallel with the main tracks over the three days of the conference, and many different things around LibreOffice development were discussed, including: bug reporting and triaging; Git and Gerrit basics; building LibreOffice from its source code; and automation via scripting.

Sponsoring and merchandise

Partner sponsors were Collabora Productivity, Passbolt and SnT (University of Luxembourg), while venue sponsors were Digital Learning Hub and 42 Luxembourg. The Luxembourg Media & Digital Design Centre organised the EdTech track, and local supporters were Business Events Luxembourg, LU-CIX, LIST and Luxembourg House of Cybersecurity. Thanks to the sponsors, attendees could get merchandise at the event, including T-shirts with the conference logo.

Full programme and videos

Full details about the event are available on our main conference website. For a quick overview of all the talks, including links to PDF versions of the presentations, see the schedule. 63 videos – covering almost all of the talks are available as a playlist on our YouTube channel:

Conference in 2025

Planning is already underway for the LibreOffice Conference 2025, which will take place in …

Today we’re at the Linux-InfoDay 2025 in Augsburg, southern Germany! If you’re in the area, pop by for a chat and grab some LibreOffice merchandise

In 2024, LibreOffice celebrated its fourteenth birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well

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

LibreOffice 24.2

On January 31, LibreOffice 24.2 was officially released after six months of work. Developers at The Document Foundation, Collabora, allotropia, CIB, Red Hat, NISZ and other companies and organisations – along with volunteers – worked on many new features.

For instance, there were many improvements to the tabbed “NotebookBar” user interface, while styles support was added for comments. A new search field was added to the Functions sidebar deck in Calc, while in terms of accessibility, several significant improvements to the handling of mouse positions and the presentation of dialogue boxes via the Accessibility APIs were made, allowing screen readers to present them correctly. And regarding security, the “Sace with Password” dialogue box now has a password strength meter, which uses zxcvbn-c to determine the password strength.

TDF’s marketing and localisation community produced and translated a video (below) which demonstrated many of the new features in LibreOffice 24.2. This was linked to in the announcement, and embedded into various web news websites that covered the release. The video is also available on PeerTube.

LibreOffice 24.8

Later in the year, on August 22, TDF released LibreOffice 24.8. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provided a large number of interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats.

In terms of features, this release added many improvements to the Navigator in Writer, including ding cross-references by drag-and-drop items, deleting footnotes and endnotes, and indicating images with broken links. In Calc, the functions FILTER, LET, RANDARRAY, SEQUENCE, SORT, SORTBY, UNIQUE, XLOOKUP and XMATCH were added, along with chart types “Pie-of-Pie” and “Bar-of-Pie” which break down a slice of a pie as a pie or bar sub-chart respectively (this also enables import of such charts from OOXML files created with Microsoft Office/365).

Many other features were added as well, and there were a large number of compatibility improvements. As with the previous release, TDF staff worked with the marketing ad localisation communities to make a video (also on PeerTube) to demonstrate some of the new features.

Regular improvements

We also released 14 minor updates …

The Document Foundation is the non-profit entity that coordinates the LibreOffice project and community. In 2024 we had with elections for the foundation’s Membership Committee, along with regular Advisory Board calls, and support for other projects and activities

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

Election of new Membership Committee (MC)

The mission of the Membership Committee is to administer membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in the Foundation’s Statutes. Members of the MC are directly elected by community members every two years, and serve for a two-year term. The Board of Directors consists of five members and three deputies.

On July 15, Eliane Domingos – chairperson in the Board of Directors at TDF – announced the election for the next MC, and asked for nominations and self-nominations. On August 27, she then announced that the nomination phase had ended, and that voting would run from 3 – 9 September. Around this time there were also three live “town-hall” Q+A meetings with the candidates, so that community members could ask questions and discuss the responses. We made video recordings from the second and third meetings, and here they are (also available on PeerTube here and here):

On September 12, Eliane announced the preliminary results, along with a “challenge” phase for people to check their votes and contest the results. And on September 27, TDF announced the final results, with full MC members being Gustavo Buzzatti Pacheco, Stéphane Guillou, Balázs Varga, Pranam Kumarbhai Lashkari and Jona Azizaj; and deputy members being Shinji Enoki, Andreas Mantke and Marco Marinello.

TDF would like to say thank you to all past and new members of the MC for their service to the community, and to all candidates for running. Congratulations to the newly elected MC members and their deputies.

Advisory Board members and meetings

The Document Foundation relies on its Advisory Board Members in order to receive advice and support. The Advisory Board’s primary function is to represent The Document Foundation’s supporters and to provide the Board of Directors with advice, guidance and proposals. Current members are Adfinis, allotropia software GmbH, Collabora, GNOME, CAGE Technologies Inc, City of Munich (Landeshaupstadt München), Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA), Software in the Public Interest (SPI), KDE e.V., and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).

Throughout the year, TDF had regular …