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 with Episode 3 of the LibreOffice Podcast – this time looking at Quality Assurance (QA) in Free and Open Source Software. Watch it below – or on PeerTube.

• Then we announced the winners in the Month of LibreOffice, May 2025, providing information on how to get sticker packs. We’ve been sending out stickers and merchandise in the last few weeks, with a bit more to come!

• On June 6, we announced LibreOffice 25.2.4, the fourth minor update to our latest stable branch. All users are recommended to upgrade.

• Next, we posted another section from The Document Foundation’s Annual Report, “LibreOffice for End User Privacy”.

• The end of Windows 10 is approaching, so it’s time to consider Linux and LibreOffice! That’s the message behind the “End of 10” campaign, which we’re supporting.

• In the middle of the month, we posted news about a new tutorial added to the wiki, showing how to create colour wheels with LibreOffice.

• Throughout June, we posted various articles about ODF, the Open Document Format used by LibreOffice (and supported in many other office suites): An Analysis of the adoption of the Open Document Format; Understanding ODF compliance and interoperability; and A technical dive into ODF.

• Then we reported back from an event: LibreOffice at the Linux Arena in Pordenone, Italy.

• Before LibreOffice there was OpenOffice, and before OpenOffice there was StarOffice. And how was StarOffice developed? We talked to Stefan Soyka, who worked on the suite in the early ’90s, and has some entertaining stories to tell

• New LibreOffice merchandise is here! We updated our Spreadshirt shop with new designs and many extra items. Buy something and support LibreOffice – some of the proceeds go back to the project!

• Registration is now open for the LibreOffice Conference 2025. Join us from 4 – 6 September in Budapest – we’ll have technical talks, workshops, social events and more…

• And finally, we announced the new LibreOffice 25.2 user guides – awesome work from the documentation team.

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

The LibreOffice community has great news: the Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, and Math User Guides are now available for version 25.2!

Yes, you read that right! With every new LibreOffice release, our Documentation Team works hard to keep up — and this time, we’ve shortened the gap between the software launch and the guides’ publication even more.

These user guides are the ultimate reference for anyone using LibreOffice — whether at home, at work, or at school. From spreadsheets to presentations, from text documents to complex equations: it’s all covered, clearly and accessibly.

The work is 100% community-driven! Jean Weber led the Writer guide, Peter Schofield coordinated the Impress, Draw, and Math guides, and Olivier Hallot headed the Calc guide.

Big thanks also to Dione Maddern, Celia Palacios, Ed Olson, B. Antonio F., Mike Kaganski, and Vasudev Narayanan for their valuable contributions.

Each new edition is more than just an update — it’s a chance to improve clarity, add the latest features, and deliver the best experience possible for end users. These guides complement the built-in LibreOffice Help and are perfect for deepening your knowledge.

The guides are available now for free download in PDF, ODT (OpenDocument format), and HTML (for online reading). And soon, you’ll be able to order printed copies via LuLu Inc.

Get your guides now:

• documentation.libreoffice.org
• books.libreoffice.org

Artwork: Eliane Domingos

Registration is now open for the LibreOffice Conference 2025! Join us from 4 – 6 September in Budapest We’ll have technical talks, workshops, social events and more…

Click here to learn more, and register

To write this article, I went beyond the limits of my technical knowledge, which is that of an advanced user who has studied standard formats and their characteristics in depth, to understand why standard formats – one of the pillars of digital sovereignty – and proprietary formats – their opposite, and one of the biggest obstacles to digital sovereignty – are not perceived as a problem by most PC users, who continue to use Microsoft’s proprietary formats and place the access and availability of their content in the hands of the US company.

To try to remedy this problem, I will try to explain as simply as possible, using non-technical language (which may shock developers, but this article is not aimed at them), some technical features of the Open Document Format (ODF), which make it the cornerstone of an open and vendor-independent ecosystem for office documents, defending the digital freedoms of all users and the governance of their content.

I will begin by explaining how to unpack an ODF file, which is nothing more than a set of XML files and other files (for images and videos) contained within a ZIP folder, in order to examine its internal components and, in particular, the content.xml file, which is the one that contains the body of the document (i.e., the user’s intellectual property).

The aim is not so much to assess conformity (compliance with specifications) and interoperability (the ability to exchange files consistently between tools), as these aspects will always be dealt with by specialists, but rather to understand the advantages for the user of the open and standard format over the closed and proprietary format (which is falsely standard, since it was approved by ISO/IEC in defiance of “their” definitions of standards).

For this reason, I will make a brief concluding digression on the characteristics of the OOXML (Office Open XML) format used by Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365, again to clarify to users the risks they face and the harm they do to themselves and other users when they use DOCX, XLSX and PPTX formats, as well as the ‘gift’ they are giving to Microsoft, to whom they are effectively entrusting the management and future of their content.

Analysing an ODF file

Take any document you have created with LibreOffice. For convenience, I recommend starting with a text document created with LibreOffice Writer, with the ODT extension. Before doing anything else, duplicate the file, because an error in the procedure could make it unreadable, and move the original to another folder.

Rename the copy, replacing the ODT extension with the ZIP extension, without deleting the dot. The file icon will become that of a compressed file. If it becomes white or empty, you have done something wrong or deleted the dot. Check all the steps until the icon becomes that of a compressed file.

At this point, right-click on the icon and select “unzip” or “expand” to extract the contents of the compressed file into a folder with the …

Get cool LibreOffice merchandise – and support our projects and community! We’ve updated our Spreadshirt shop with new designs, and part of the sales go to The Document Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind the suite.

Click here to visit the shop

The Open Document Format (ODF) is an open standard format for office documents, which offers a vendor-independent, royalty-free way to encode text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.
However, to realise its potential, it is necessary to understand the concepts of compliance – the degree to which an implementation adheres to ODF specifications – and interoperability – the ability to exchange and view ODF files without loss of fidelity or functionality across different applications and platforms.

ODF is an XML-based file format that has been standardised by OASIS and ratified by ISO/IEC 26300. Milestones include:

• ODF 1.0 (2006): the initial version defining the basic document types: text (.odt), spreadsheet (.ods) and presentation (.odp).
• ODF 1.1 (2012): updates to formula specifications and accessibility improvements were made, but it was never submitted for standardisation.
• ODF 1.2 (2015): introduces digital signatures, RDF metadata, and OpenFormula for standardising spreadsheet calculations.
• ODF 1.3 (2020): an extension of security features, including improvements to encryption and import/export conventions, as well as a clarification of compliance clauses.

Each version has strengthened the role of ODF as a universal interchange format, ensuring that documents remain readable and editable in all programs, both now and in the future.

Definition of compliance

Compliance refers to the extent to which a given software implements the ODF standard. It comprises several levels:

1. Structural compliance: ensures that file archives contain the expected XML files (e.g. content.xml, styles.xml and meta.xml), in accordance with the ODF Packaging specifications.
2. Schema validation: verifies that the XML content matches the applicable ODF schemas (Relax NG or W3C XML Schema). This prevents a <draw:image> element, for example, from appearing where only text is permitted.
3. FeatuSecurity profilesre compliance: supports the required features (styles, tables, charts and metadata) and the correct implementation of the optional features required by the application (digital signatures, encryption and change tracking).
4. Formula compliance: for spreadsheets, adherence to OpenFormula specification ensures that formulas behave consistently across different applications.
5. Compliance statements and profiles: applications often declare their compliance levels (e.g. ODF 1.2 Part 1: OpenDocument Schema). Some define profiles, which are subsets of the full standard tailored to specific industries or workflows.

Non-compliant files risk becoming unreadable or displaying incorrectly in other applications. Validating ODF schemas and integrating compliance tools enables developers and users to guarantee the longevity and accuracy of documents.

The interoperability landscape

Even when two applications claim ODF compliance, disparities can arise.

• Rendering differences: variations in character substitution, line spacing or image placement can slightly alter the layout.
• Functionality differences: for example, an editor may support digital signatures, but implement them in a way that causes signatures to be rejected when files are exchanged.
• Use of extensions: some applications use proprietary extensions (e.g. custom XML blocks) that others do not recognise, which can result in data or content loss.
• Metadata management: different handling of document properties, such as author, version history or custom metadata, can hinder workflows.

To achieve strong interoperability, systematic testing is required.

1. Automated …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell us about the office location and team back then!

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

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

Marco Marega writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SOVEREIGN BODIES

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

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

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

EUROPE

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

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

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

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

Regina Henschel writes:

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

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

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