Welcome to The Document Foundation Planet

This is a feed aggregator that collects what LibreOffice and Document Foundation contributors are writing in their respective blogs.

To have your blog added to this aggregator, please mail the website@global.libreoffice.org mailinglist or file a ticket in Redmine.


Thursday
30 January, 2025


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The histogram says it all.

First, rapid growth between 2011 and 2014 to 30 million downloads, despite the fierce hostility of the project created to kill LibreOffice.

Then a few years of stagnation, at a time when it seemed that desktop office suites were destined to die, and fashion was driving users to the cloud.

Then the upswing, when even the most fashionable users realised that desktop office suites would never die and would coexist with the cloud.

In 2019, a series of attacks on the download counter – no data is collected other than the click on the DOWNLOAD button – led to a barely credible increase (the figure you see has already been cleaned up as much as possible).

After 2019, a slow but inexorable growth to over 35 million downloads – and 400 million downloads since 2011, with an average of 28.6 million downloads per year – in 2024.

Thanks to everyone: those who developed LibreOffice, those who helped improve it, and those who downloaded it to use it.

Click here to download LibreOffice


Wednesday
29 January, 2025


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We are pleased to announce the successful migration of Firebird Docker images to their new home:https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/firebird-dockerThe images are now published on Docker Hub athttps://hub.docker.com/r/firebirdsql/firebirdThanks to Adriano dos Santos Fernandes for his invaluable contributions and improvements throughout this process.


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LibreOffice project and community recap banner

LibreOffice 25.2 – our next major release – is due to arrive next week! But while you’re waiting, here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more…

Hazard screenshot

Calc Guide cover

Czech Getting Started guide cover

localwriter screenshot

FOSDEM logo

Document Freedom Day logo

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!


Tuesday
28 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-28 Tuesday

14:09 UTC

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  • Planning call; sync with Karen, lunch.
  • Published strip #2 early, FOSDEM travel coming up; an introduction to community road building:
    The Open Road to Freedom - strip#2 - community road building

Monday
27 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-27 Monday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up earlyish, mail chew - a lot of conference backlog. Sync with Lily, Miklos, Marketing team, Naomi, Pedro, Eloy.
  • Dug through urgent conference notes, wrote status reports, tried to get to code review.

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Every year, on the last Wednesday of March, advocates of free and open technologies come together to celebrate Document Freedom Day (DFD). In 2025, the Document Freedom Day will happen on March 26, and will be driven by the LibreOffice community.

Today, Document Freedom Day – together with Software Freedom Day (SFD, celebrated in September) and Hardware Freedom Day (HFD, celebrated in April) – is coordinated by the Digital Freedom Foundation (DFF). This global event raises awareness about the importance of open standards and accessible formats in the digital age, empowering individuals, organizations, and governments to embrace freedom in how they create, share, and preserve information.

But what exactly is Document Freedom Day, and why is it so crucial in today’s world? Let’s explore its significance, the challenges posed by proprietary formats, and how embracing open standards can create a more inclusive, transparent, and resilient digital future.

What is Document Freedom Day?

Document Freedom Day was established by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to promote the use of open standards for documents, and transferred to the Digital Freedom Foundation in 2016. It is a day dedicated to advocating for formats and tools that ensure documents can be accessed, edited, and shared by anyone, without restrictions or reliance on specific software or vendors.

At its core, Document Freedom Day celebrates the idea that information should be accessible to all. It highlights the need for transparency and interoperability in digital documents, ensuring that no one is excluded or locked into using a particular platform due to proprietary constraints.

The Problem with Proprietary Formats

Proprietary formats come with significant drawbacks. They are typically controlled by a single company or entity, meaning that access to these formats can be restricted or even revoked at any time. This lack of control over how information is stored and accessed poses numerous challenges:

  1. Vendor Lock-In: Proprietary formats often force users to rely on specific software, limiting their choices and tying them to a single vendor. This can lead to long-term costs, as organizations may have to pay for updates, licensing fees, or migration to alternative platforms.
  2. Inaccessibility: Over time, older proprietary formats may become obsolete, making it difficult or impossible to access historical data. This is especially problematic for governments, libraries, and archives that need to preserve information for future generations.
  3. Lack of Transparency: Proprietary formats often hide how data is stored, making it harder to verify, analyze, or integrate with other systems. This lack of transparency can lead to inefficiencies and mistrust.
  4. Exclusion: Individuals who cannot afford expensive software or who use alternative platforms may find themselves excluded from accessing or sharing documents.

The Power of Open Standards

Open standards offer a solution to these challenges by providing formats that are publicly available and free from restrictive licensing. They are designed to be:

  • Interoperable: Open standards enable seamless communication between different software and systems, allowing users to share and access information across platforms.
  • Accessible: They ensure that anyone, regardless of their tools or financial

Sunday
26 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-26 Sunday

21:00 UTC

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  • Guitar with Cedric on Piano in the morning service. Chat with Su, pulled pork for lunch with E. - rested left & right, caught up with Dad.

Saturday
25 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-25 Saturday

21:00 UTC

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  • Rested until late-ish; lunch with E. Out for a nice countryside walk with J.
  • Practiced music for tomorrow, David over in the evening for dinner, caught up & played a game with everyone.

Friday
24 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-24 Friday

21:00 UTC

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  • Earlyish breakfast; workshop on COOL setup & scaling. Caught up with more people for a long time. Lunch. Bid 'bye to many, catch-up with Ludovic & Alex.
  • Taxi with Lily to the airport, flight, home - dinner, bed; tired.

Thursday
23 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-23 Thursday

21:00 UTC

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  • Early breakfast; booth - lots of funky yellow backed cartoon identities on display. Met lots of partners, customers, caught up with Lothar & Thorsten, keynote on migration pieces.
  • Lunch; booth & chats, enjoyed Lily's German COOL product workshop, more catching up with people left and right - dinner in the evening, back to hotel room; and more hours working on slides for next day .

Wednesday
22 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-22 Wednesday

21:00 UTC

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  • Catch up with Dave - our talented cartoonist with whom I've been working on something new and exciting: to build a weekly strip to try to communicate the goodness, humour & intricacy around software, communities, ecosystems and more:
    The Open Road to Freedom - strip#1
  • All Hands meeting, packed and set off for the Univention Summit.
  • Drove to STN, flight to BRE, taxi to Das Schiff - and became part of a Becks advert; good to catch up with lots of friends and colleages; worked on slides until extremely late with Lily - collaborative, pipelined slide creation & translation with COOL.

Tuesday
21 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-21 Tuesday

21:00 UTC

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  • Got to a status report, planning call - caught up with overhanging decisions. Sync with Karen, then Hannah, lunch.
  • Monthly management meeting, catch up with Szymon. Partner calls, and sync with Till.
  • Dinner, worked until very late on first slides, then contract review; sleep.

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FOSDEM logo

FOSDEM is one of the largest meetups for free and open source software projects, and it takes place every year in Brussels at the ULB Solbosch campus. This year it’ll be on 1 and 2 February – and, of course, LibreOffice and The Document Foundation will be there! Our stand will be in in K level 1, so come by and have a chat, grab some merchandise (stickers, pens, flyers, beer/coffee mats), and support us with a donation if you like 😊

LibreOffice stand at FOSDEM

We also have the LibreOffice devroom on the first day, with 20 talks and presentations about the software, technology and community.

See you there!


Monday
20 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-20 Monday

21:00 UTC

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  • Lots of 1:1 calls, with a couple of partner calls in between. Dinner, minuted PCC meeting until lateish.

Sunday
19 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-19 Sunday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up early, played bass at Church, home for lunch, put together some tunes for the evening service & did setup & music there; Christine spoke. Back, n-ice-cream, movie, rest, sleep.

Saturday
18 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-18 Saturday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up early, helped J. chop up bits of over-enthusiastic tree in the garden, chat with Dad.
  • E-mail, worked on slides; early dinner, YFC fund-raising Quizz, home, worked on slides until late.

Friday
17 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-17 Friday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up early, sync with Dave, Anuj, lunch with Julia, worked away at contractuals. Onto mail catch-up, and slide re-working.

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LibreOffice 25.2 will be released as final at the beginning of February, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.2 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) the forth and last pre-release since the development of version 25.2 started in mid Juny, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.2 RC1, 104 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 55 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.

LibreOffice 25.2 RC2 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it will replace the standard installation.

In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email account in order to create a new account ).

For help, you can contact the QA Team directly in the QA IRC channel or via Matrix.

LibreOffice is a volunteer-driven community project, so please help us to test – we appreciate it!

Happy testing!!

Download it now!


Thursday
16 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-16 Thursday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up too early; train - with Christian, sky-train, some data analysis on the plane, heathrow-express.
  • Home, read minutes of calls I missed: seems I should miss more calls; text review, dinner with the family. Worked after dinner, missed bible-stidy group, bed early.

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Happy new year 2025! I wish a great year for you, and the global LibreOffice community. Now that we are now in 2025, I briefly discuss the year 2024 and outlook for 2024 in the development blog.

LibreOffice Conference 2024, Luxembourg

LibreOffice Conference 2024, Luxembourg

At The Document Foundation (TDF), our aim is to improve LibreOffice, the leading free/open source office suite that has millions of users around the world. Our work is community-driven, and the software needs your contribution to become better, and work in a way that you like.

My goal here, is to help people understand LibreOffice code easier, and eventually participate in LibreOffice core development to make LibreOffice better for everyone. In 2024, I wrote 22 posts around LibreOffice development in the dev blog (4 of them are unpublished drafts).

Outlook For the New Year

Focus of the development blog for 2025 in this blog will be:

  • Introducing new EasyHacks
  • Describing user interface creation with VCL
  • Explaining LibreOffice architecture
  • Explaining Python interaction with LibreOffice

I have written about some of these topics in 2024. Therefore, this year I will try to expand the previous writings and provide new articles about them. For example, creating user interfaces using VCL with the help of glade interface designer will be one of important things to discuss.

You can give feedback by writing a comment here, or sending me an email to hossein AT libreoffice DOT org.

We provide mentoring support to those who want to start LibreOffice development. You are welcome to contact me if you need help to build LibreOffice and do some EasyHacks via the above email address. Also, you can always refer to our Getting Involved Wiki page:

Let’s hope a great year for LibreOffice (and the world) in 2025.


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localwriter screenshot

LibreOffice is a privacy-oriented office suite that runs on your own computer and doesn’t include AI features out-of-the-box. But we know that many users are interested in combining AI tools with the suite, so we talked to John Balis who is working on a (fully optional!) LibreOffice extension called localwriter. Here’s what he had to say…

What does the extension do?

Localwriter is a libreoffice writer extension to allow for inline generative editing with local inference. It can be used with any language model supported by Ollama or text-generation-webui. This extension adds two powerful commands to LibreOffice Writer:

  • Extend Selection – Uses a language model to predict what comes after the selected text. There are a lot of ways to use this. Some example use cases for this include, writing a story or an email given a particular prompt, adding additional possible items to a grocery list, or summarizing the selected text.
  • Edit Selection – A dialog box appears to prompt the user for instructions about how to edit the selected text, then the selected text is replaced by the edited text. Some examples for use cases for this include changing the tone of an email, translating text to a different language, and semantically editing a scene in a story.

When did you start working on it?

I started working on localwriter in July 2024, because I wanted an AI tool to assist with my writing that would benefit from the intrinsic advantages in terms of availability (can’t lose access), confidentiality (doesn’t leak data), and integrity (no surprise model version changes) that come with using a fully open source local AI stack instead of a third-party API. I feel it is really important to embrace learning to benefit from artificial intelligence without sacrificing agency, and this software follows from that line of thinking.

What are the current limitations, and what’s coming next?

localwriter currently only supports LibreOffice Writer, although Calc support is in development and will be offered in the next release. Another limitation is that it does not support streaming, and does not offer a “Chat with document” feature.

How can others help to improve it?

There are a ton of open feature requests in the repository from several users, which should be really easy for an experienced LibreOffice extension developer to complete. I can easily set up anyone interested with a task to work on. Tests would be welcome, as currently it doesn’t have any tests. Also, donating to me helps me allocate my own time towards development.

Get the extension here


Wednesday
15 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-15 Wednesday

21:00 UTC

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  • More meetings & planning - tour of the very well equipped maker-space - and a party to celebrate the awesome work that ZenDiS has been doing in the year since its founding.
  • Had a TDF Advisory Board call in the middle: encouraged by the level of competence of the advice.

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Czech LibreOffice Getting Started Guide cover

Zdeněk Crhonek (aka “raal”) from the Czech LibreOffice community writes:

The Czech team has finished its translation of the LibreOffice Getting Started guide 24.8. As usual it was a team effort, with translations by Petr Kuběj, Zdeněk Crhonek and Radomír Strnad; localized pictures from Roman Toman; and technical support from Miloš Šrámek. Thanks to all the team for their work!

The Czech translation of the Getting Started Guide 24.8 is available for download here.

The team will continue working on a translation of the Math Guide 24.8. We always looking for new translators and correctors. Join us!

Stanislav Horáček cleaned up the bookshelf page and he added an online version of the Math Guide. More online versions are ti come.

Great work everyone! 😊


Tuesday
14 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-14 Tuesday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up early, tram to a meeting - all-day meeting plus dinner with partners & ZenDiS, up late.

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Dione Maddern y el equipo (global) de documentación de LibreOffice se enorgullecen de anunciar la disponibilidad inmediata de Guía de LibreOffice Calc 24.8, una actualización de la Guía de Calc 24.2 existente con las mejoras disponibles en LibreOffice Calc …


Monday
13 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-13 Monday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up unpleasantly early: train, train, tube, train, plane, sky-train, train, train - experience to get to Bochum via Dusseldorf for meetings - left my luggage on one of the trains at some point - annoying.
  • Met up with Lily, Frank & out for dinner slowly gathering more partners.

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Helen Borrie, a key figure in the Firebird relational database project and a longtime contributor at IBPhoenix, passed away on January 2, 2025. Her contributions were essential to Firebird’s creation and its development over the past 25 years.Read the rest of the official announcement


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We're happy to announce the first release of Jaybird 6, Jaybird 6.0.0.


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Dione Maddern and The Documentation Team are proud to announce the immediate availability of the LibreOffice Calc Guide 24.8, an update of the existing Calc Guide 24.2 with enhancements taken from the current LibreOffice 24.8 Calc module.

Calc Guide 24.8

The book was reviewed for clarity, readability and content additions, notably the Calc database table referencing in formulas, removal of deprecated JavaScript debugger and refactoring of the Calc’s chart topic – in which the chapter on charts was split in two, one for the chart basics and the second for the chart types. Dione Maddern, Calc editor says:

I took on the challenge of compiling the Calc Guide because I wanted to learn about advanced editing and working with master documents. While I’ve previously worked on large documents in the engineering and insurance industries, documents were often compiled with clunky cut-and-paste techniques which created a lot of errors and labor-intensive rework. Working on the Calc Guide 24.8 was a great opportunity to expand my skills in LibreOffice and document production generally. It was also a wonderful opportunity to work with the LibreOffice Documentation Team. I had a great time working with such a fun and supportive team.

Special thanks to Ed Olson, Lisa Samy and Claire Wood for their review of the contents of the guide. And to B. Antonio F. for his throughout review of formatting the guide and by writing a set of macros, bundled in an LibreOffice extension that allows automatic and assisted fixing of images, tables , styles and more.


Dione Maddern

It was also a wonderful opportunity to work with the LibreOffice Documentation Team. I had a great time working with such a fun and supportive team. (Dione Maddern)


Ed Olson

It has been an honor to share my wordsmithing skills with the LibreOffice documentation team. Replacing verbose paragraphs in the Calc guides with simplified, minimalist text has been both challenging and rewarding. I look forward to continuing my work on other applications in the suite as new releases become available. (Ed Olson)


Lisa Samy

Joining the Calc Guide team marked my first time contributing to an open-source platform. My time working with other team members was both enriching, yet eye-opening to all the facets of document editing. As such, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with the LibreOffice Community as a whole. (Lisa Samy)


B. Antonio F.

I accepted the challenge of creating mechanisms to harmonize he appearance of chapter text according to the chapter template established by the documentation team. It was an opportunity to delve deeper into macro programming and get to know the LibreOffice API better. SanityCheck macros allow you to correct formatting errors (based on styles), correctly adjust images, tables, and automatically apply descriptions for accessibility. With SanityCheck you can check documentation chapters in English, Spanish and Portuguese. (B. Antonio F.)


Claire Wood

I enjoyed working on the Calc Guide as it gave me the opportunity to work with a truly global team. The content also challenged my knowledge about spreadsheets. I was happy to develop my knowledge, getting new information


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By Ndidi Folasade Ogboi

LibreOffice Writer has long been a trusted tool for users worldwide, offering an open-source solution for documents. But what happens when we take a step back and look at the user experience? How do templates fit into the workflows of users, what makes a great template and where do users want LibreOffice writer to improve?…

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