All the posts we have dedicated to the OOXML format – and many of those we will dedicate to it in future – analyse the reasons why it is a proprietary format despite having been approved by ISO as a standard, open format. However, they do not address the reasons behind or the details of the standardisation process.

This is a gap we hope to fill with this post, which summarises the events that took place between the standardisation of the ODF format – a standard and open format – and the standardisation process for OOXML, as well as the process itself, which was completely broken in every respect, from methodology to procedure.

Microsoft had begun work on an XML-based document format around the year 2000, with the aim of modernising the obsolete DOC, XLS and PPT formats, which were simply the serialisation (writing) of memory content to disc, and as such were no longer in line with the evolution of Microsoft Office.

The aim was certainly not to develop a standard format, not least because the echo of Bill Gates’ internal memo – “allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people’s browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company; we have to make sure that Office documents depend on proprietary capabilities” (slightly abridged version of the original memo) – had not yet died down.

Consequently, during the ODF standardisation process, Microsoft had stated that it would not support the ODF standard format, as it was not in its own interests.

In early 2006, however, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts – one of the historic states of the confederation – announced that it would adopt ODF for all public documents, so that they would be independent of software from a single vendor.

This decision provoked a reaction from Microsoft, which could not tolerate the fact that a US state was adopting a standard, open format developed outside its control, which benefited users rather than its own commercial interests.

The story of the ISO/IEC 29500 “standard”

The battle over the ISO/IEC 29500 “standard” – the ISO standardisation of Microsoft’s Office Open XML format between 2006 and 2008 – is a perfect example of a broken standardisation process.

It is not an exceptional case, but it has been thoroughly documented and offers important food for thought for all those who continue to maintain that the OOXML format is a standard.

The story began in December 2006, when Ecma International – whose Technical Committee 45, responsible for the project, at the time was chaired by two Microsoft employees – submitted the OOXML specification to the ISO/IEC JTC1 (Joint Technical Committee) of ISO/IEC for adoption as an international standard under the “fast-track” procedure, designed for tried-and-tested specifications requiring only administrative ratification.

The decision to submit a 6,000-page specification – one of the longest ever submitted to ISO – via a process designed for short and fairly well-established documents had a decisive impact on the nature of the review to which the standard was …

A recap of the LibreOffice Conference 2026, which took place in September in Pordenone, northern Italy. Thanks to the local team for organising the event!

The announcement of LibreOffice 26.8 had a noticeable positive effect on download figures, which have since exceeded one million per week, totalling 9.4 million downloads over eight weeks, from 24 August to 18 October.

To these must be added updates for the Windows version, which are counted separately and are not included in the download figures, and downloads of older versions, which continue to be fairly high.
The three maps, generated automatically by Matomo, show, in order, visits to the downloads site (11,426,169), visits to the updates site (90,042,601), and visits to the site for older versions (39,669,854).

Anyone curious to know the origin of the visits (which is obviously higher than the number of downloads) can download a ZIP file containing the three CSV files. These figures are reliable but not precise to the nearest unit, as a visit does not necessarily result in a download, particularly in the case of updates and older versions.

Prior to the announcement of LibreOffice 26.8, the number of downloads was less than one million per week, although it was fairly close to that figure. In 2026, the number of downloads has grown dramatically compared to 2025, to the extent that the total for the year has already been exceeded, with 10 weeks still to go.

What are the reasons for this growth? It is difficult to explain based on the data, given that downloads are free and completely anonymous.

We like to think that the consistency of the LibreOffice project – which has been championing the concept of digital sovereignty and standard document formats for years – and the robustness of the software, which has never sought to be a clone of the most widely used office suite on the market but has always strived to forge its own path, are two very important factors that, in the long term, represent a significant advantage over all other products.

There is still a long way to go, however. Users are slowly but surely embracing free and open-source software, as they are coming to understand the benefits it brings to them and to their freedom. We are ready to welcome them.

Standards are technical documents drafted by engineers and discussed in committees before being implemented in code. However, to discuss them only in technical terms would be to overlook an essential aspect of their nature and function.

In fact, standards are also – and above all – political tools because they define market players, determine the direction of development, and establish the interests served by the ecosystem. In other words, they underpin the market’s power relations.

What a standard does

A standard is a coordination mechanism that allows multiple independent parties, such as software developers, hardware manufacturers, content creators, governments and businesses, to collaborate without having to negotiate the terms of their interaction every time.

Like a language, a standard enables communication with everyone who speaks it. It is an immensely valuable promise of universal communication, which is why standards are so important in computing, where the network effects of compatibility multiply rapidly.

However, a standard also defines the conditions for participation.

A simple, transparent standard based on widely available knowledge can be implemented by multiple parties without creating inequality.

In contrast, a complex, deliberately obscure standard that requires specific expertise can only be implemented correctly by those who defined it, creating inequality.

Therefore, the complexity of a standard acts as a barrier, determining who can access the market and the balance of power within it.

Open ecosystems

An open ecosystem does not depend on a document containing the specifications of the standard, but rather on any stakeholder’s ability to implement the standard fully and correctly in accordance with the specifications, without resorting to undocumented behaviour or reverse engineering.

This requires the specifications to be written clearly, to allow for only one interpretation, and for the standard not to depend on behaviours defined by the reference implementation, which would make the latter a mandatory dependency. It also requires the standard to be stable enough to prevent compliant implementations from becoming obsolete due to silent revisions.

When all these conditions are met, the standard can be implemented by anyone, even those who played no part in its creation. Universities, small businesses, open-source communities, government agencies, and individual developers can all produce compliant software.

Competition is possible based on the quality of the implementation rather than proximity to the standard’s authors or reverse engineering. The standard provides a foundation upon which anyone can build.

Closed ecosystems

While the closure of an ecosystem through a standard may be accidental, it is usually intentional and based on a series of fairly easy-to-list mechanisms.

The first mechanism is unnecessary complexity. When a standard defines its own solutions to problems that already have valid, widely implemented solutions, it forces other players to reinvent the wheel. Every proprietary subsystem is a new element that increases costs and often artificially limits compatibility.

The second mechanism is underdetermination. When specifications are ambiguous or limited, different implementations produce different results. When a document is displayed slightly differently, users always blame the second application rather than the format. This is an …

Yesterday, MS Publisher users joined the millions of users who have been abandoned – or forced into a completely unjustified update – by Microsoft over the years, alongside those using Office LTSC 2021 and Office 2021. Consequently, anyone who has purchased a Microsoft 365 subscription will no longer be able to open their PUB files.

For millions of schools, parishes, associations, small businesses and local authorities, this is a major problem. For over thirty years, they have been producing newsletters, leaflets, programmes, posters and calendars using Publisher. From today, these documents are in a proprietary format, the only fully compatible application for which has been abandoned by the very company that created it.

What Microsoft suggests

Microsoft suggests converting PUB files to PDF format for viewing and printing, and to DOCX format for editing. In reality, neither of these represents a solution to the problem.

PDF preserves the layout but is not designed to be edited. DOCX can be edited, but Word is not a page-layout tool, so complex files lose their formatting during conversion.

In both cases, users are asked to transfer content from one vendor-controlled proprietary format to another vendor-controlled proprietary format – which is, in fact, the same vendor. This is because documents are regarded as a by-product of the application, rather than as information belonging to those who created them.

For Microsoft, therefore, it is perfectly normal for access to content to disappear along with the application. This is a fact that should raise more than a few questions, but it seems to go unnoticed, to the extent that many Microsoft users claim this problem does not affect them.

The free software community has solved the problem

Publisher’s PUB format is not an open standard, so the developers working on the Document Liberation Project have reverse-engineered it and created the libmspub library, which is used by LibreOffice and Scribus to import Publisher files. This is to enable MS Publisher users to continue reading their own documents regardless of Microsoft’s decisions.

This means it is possible to open PUB files using free software and save them in the OpenDocument Format (ODF), the only standard, open format for office documents, which is not dependent on any single application or company. Alternatively, they can be opened with Scribus, which is open-source desktop publishing software, but does not use a standard document format.

LibreOffice Draw is the quickest way to open, view, edit and manage Publisher documents, and although it is not a desktop publishing application, it can be used for small multi-page documents, such as newsletters, or for single-page documents of any format.

A lesson to bear in mind

MS Publisher is not the first Microsoft application to disappear from the market, and it certainly won’t be the last. Each time, users are faced with the same question: who controls access to my documents? If the format is proprietary, the answer is: the vendor. If the format is standard and open, such as ODF, the answer is: the user …

When governments, organisations and companies move to LibreOffice – as we’re seeing in Austria, Germany and other countries – they usually enlist the help of Certified Migration Professionals.

Recently in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, we held a LibreOffice Migration Workshop. 40 attendees registered, from the public and private sectors, and the session was conducted pro bono by Lothar Becker, co-chair of LibreOffice’s Certification Committee. The goal of the workshop was to grow and foster the LibreOffice Technology ecosystem by supporting partners and government organisations in facilitating migrations to the suite.

It took place in the conference rooms of a hotel in central Nairobi, with a great view:

The event was hosted and funded by the Kenya branch of GIZ Germany, along with The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. The first two days focused on LibreOffice, covering best practices for migrations to LibreOffice Technology, with the first day being more user-centric and looking at the user interface and features of the software. There was also a general introduction to TDF and open source.

Then, the second day focused more on the migration process, providing deeper insights into migration and training protocols. Other topics included digital sovereignty with the Open Document Format (ODF) and other certification processes with TDF.

On the third day Lothar gave a talk called “Open source Community of Practice” in his capacity as OSBA board member. The talk focused on “Open Source as an Enabler of Digital Sovereignty & Innovation” with respect to DPI, Free and Open Source Software, open standards, and AI.

Special thanks to Carsten Glöckner, Amrit Labhuram, their team from GIZ Kenya for all their help and support in organising these events. Lastly, during the workshop Lothar had the opportunity to learn about the valuable work of the Telesky Foundation for digital participation of all children in Kenya from John Mbugua. Lothar handed over a book about “Ada & Zangemann” from Matthias Kirschner (Free Software Foundation Europe).

Last month we had the LibreOffice Conference 2026 in Pordenone, northern Italy. Huge thanks to the organisers for such a great event! At lunchtime on the final day we took a group photo, which you can see above – but of course, some people had left by then, so thanks to those people as well for attending

We’ve also finalised the YouTube playlist with 32 talks from the event. For a few talks which had recording issues, we don’t have videos of them, but the volunteer organisers did a great job recording the vast majority of talks.

The videos are also available on the Pordenone LUG’s PeerTube channel.

Now we’re looking ahead to the VII Latin American Congress of LibreOffice, and FOSDEM. We hope to see you there!

Since its founding in 2010, The Document Foundation has used the LibreOffice logo to represent itself. This was a deliberate choice: a young project needed to concentrate recognition on a single name and a single mark, and LibreOffice was the name people needed to know.

Sixteen years later, the foundation’s work extends well beyond the product. TDF takes part in the development of the Open Document Format (ODF) standard, contributes to policy discussions on interoperability and digital sovereignty, and works with public administrations, standards bodies and other open source organisations. In these contexts, the foundation speaks as an institution, not as a software project, and it needs a signature of its own.

For this reason, we have worked with Ura Design to create a visual identity for The Document Foundation, consisting of a logo, a colour palette and a typeface. The logomark is a stylised page, a reference to the documents and the document standard at the centre of the foundation’s mission. It is shown here in its primary version.

The colour palette is built around the green of the logo, with a neutral scale for text and backgrounds. All the text and background combinations recommended in the guide meet the WCAG 2.1 contrast requirements, so that materials produced with the new identity remain accessible.

The typeface is Inter, designed by Rasmus Andersson and released under the SIL Open Font License. It is used for the wordmark of the logo as well as for all texts, from reports and presentations to the website. A typeface released under a free licence is consistent with the foundation’s mission: anyone can use it, in LibreOffice or in any other application, without restrictions.

Nothing changes for LibreOffice. Its name, logo and visual identity remain exactly as they are. The two identities have different roles: LibreOffice identifies the software, while The Document Foundation identifies the organisation that hosts LibreOffice and its community, and represents them in the wider world.

The logo package is available for download at https://tdf.io/tdflogo. It includes vector (SVG) and raster (PNG) versions of the logo, a favicon, and avatars for social media. The Visual Identity Style Guide explains which version of the logo to use in each context, and sets out the colour palette, the typography and the rules for applying them consistently. Use of the logo is governed by TDF’s trademark policy.

Over the coming months, the new identity will replace the LibreOffice logo on the foundation’s website, social media accounts and institutional documents. Templates for LibreOffice Writer and Impress will also follow. If you maintain pages or materials that refer to The Document Foundation as an organisation, please update them with the new files. Pages that refer to LibreOffice should continue to use the LibreOffice logo.

Questions about the visual identity and its use can be sent to italo@documentfoundation.org

Unfortunately, the release of LibreOffice 26.8.1 has been a bit of a struggle, firstly due to a series of minor issues with the packaging of the Windows version, and then because of a serious malfunction in the server managing the downloads, which forced us to revert to the previous version for a few days.

Today, at last, LibreOffice 26.8.1 is available for download. All links have been checked at least three times to prevent the same problems from recurring. We would like to thank all our most loyal users – those who update LibreOffice immediately after every announcement – for their patience.

And we hope that this completely unexpected malfunction has not put any users off LibreOffice. The download link remains the same: https://www.libreoffice.org/download

We are releasing the State of the Project Slide Deck, which is updated quarterly and based on data extracted from the LibreOffice dashboard and the Matomo repository between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.

Over the course of 12 months, 297 developers worked on the source code, making a total of 11,676 new commits (Git). Of these, 2,596 (22%) were provided by 228 volunteer developers (77%), 4,818 (41%) by 11 developers from The Document Foundation (4%), and 4,636 (37%) by 58 developers from seven ecosystem companies (19%).

The slide deck is also a tribute to the top 20 Git and Gerrit committers, the top 20 Bugzilla issue submitters, the top 20 Discourse contributors, and the top 20 Weblate translators. Thank you to all of them and to all the other contributors.

Examining donations and downloads, the trend during the first nine months of 2026 confirms the positive trend that began in early 2025. The number of donations and downloads increased significantly in August and September 2026 thanks to a number of small but important changes to the marketing strategy and donation mechanism. It is important to note that the figures refer to the number of transactions, rather than their value, which is available via the ledgers published on The Document Foundation website.

You are invited to view the slides and download the file to compare it with the previous slide decks published in January, April and July. The next slide deck will be available in January and will cover the 12 months between 1 January 2026 and 31 December 2026.

In January 2026, we started publishing these slide decks to provide a transparent overview of the project’s progress through some of the most significant development, download and donation data collected by the TDF marketing team.