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
13 February, 2025


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LibreOffice 25.2 banner

One week ago, we announced LibreOffice 25.2, our brand new major release. It’s packed with 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 stats…

647,961 downloads

These are just stats for our official downloads page, of course – many Linux users will have acquired the new release via their distribution’s package repositories.

11,313 views, shares and likes on social media

Combining our Mastodon, Bluesky, X/Twitter and Facebook posts about the announcement, and all the likes, shares, views and comments, we get 11,313. Thanks to everyone who spread the word on social media! 😊

528 upvotes on Reddit

On release day, we organised an “ask us anything” event on Reddit. Members of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice community joined in the discussions and answered questions from users and potential contributors.

Huge thanks to our worldwide community of volunteers, and certified developers, for all their work on this release!


Wednesday
12 February, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-02-12 Wednesday

17:42 UTC

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Tuesday
11 February, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-02-11 Tuesday

21:00 UTC

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  • Planning call, sync with Karen, Andras & partners. Out for a run in the afternoon with J. - lovely. Worked late trying to dig back through piled-up E-mail.

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General Activities

  1. Olivier Hallot (TDF) added help pages for new Calc functions TOROW(), TOCOL(), WRAPROWS(), WRAPCOLS(), EXPAND(), TAKE() and DROP(), added dark mode support to the help interface, improved help for PDF/UA, did cleanups in the Xapian-based search in online help, added help for tables styles in Writer and improved help related to printing
  2. Dione Maddern added a help page for Cell Appearance Sidebar deck
  3. Stanislav Horáček did some cleanups in help
  4. Gábor Kelemen (allotropia) added a detailed list of allowed PDF password characters into help and improved the developer tools for finding unneeded includes and UI strings that might need to be translatable
  5. Tomaž Vajngerl (Collabora) continued working on PDF 2.0 support and document themes and fixed an Excel compatibility issue with empty values of defined names
  6. Miklós Vajna, Andras Timar, Henry Castro, Gökay Şatır, Attila Szűcs, Szymon Kłos and Pranam Lashkari (Collabora) worked on LOKit used by Collabora Online
  7. Xisco Faulí (TDF) implemented new Calc functions, TOCOL, TOROW, WRAPCOLS, WRAPROWS, TAKE, DROP, EXPAND and CHOOSEROWS, added support for setuptools and pip in Python scripting, upgraded many dependencies, added some unit tests and did many code stability improvements
  8. Michael Stahl (allotropia) continued improving the correctness of HTML import regarding formatting and fixed issues with table splitting in Writer’s layout
  9. Mike Kaganski (Collabora) fixed an issue with opening newly-created database forms, fixed Basic isNumeric() function giving incorrect results, fixed an installation issue affecting Active Directory setups on Windows, fixed issues with allowed characters in file name when exporting as PDF, fixed wrong number of results being reported when going over 1000 while executing Find All in Calc, fixed inability to pass a Date object to an UNO API method, fixed an issue with handling of Variant types in Basic, made handling of conditional formatting with colour conditions more robust when moving columns, made intercepting .uno:Open command work again, fixed a crash related to regular expressions in Basic and made SQL queries handle negative values
  10. Caolán McNamara (Collabora) fixed crashes, fixed many issues found by static analysers and did code cleanups and optimisations
  11. Stephan Bergmann (allotropia) worked on the WASM build. He also adapted the code to compiler changes and did code cleanups
  12. Noel Grandin (Collabora) improved the speed of inserting rotated images to Writer. He also did many code cleanups and optimisations
  13. Justin Luth (Collabora) fixed DOCX import issues with frames before tables getting anchored to a table cell instead of an empty paragraph and missing header properties in page styles
  14. Michael Weghorn (TDF) continued cleaning up and reorganising accessibility-related code, did refactoring in Linux printer code and fixed some crashes. He also worked on using native widgets in Qt UIs
  15. Balázs Varga (allotropia) fixed import of cropped vector graphic objects in PPTX files, improved warnings related to allowed characters in the PDF password input dialog, made it possible to show or hide the text in some password dialogs (more to be included), fixed broken cropped SVG

Monday
10 February, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-02-10 Monday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up earlyish, parent/teacher call with E. mail chew, lots of 1:1's in a row all day, another parent/teacher call at lunch. Worked late.

Sunday
09 February, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-02-09 Sunday

21:00 UTC

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  • All Saints in the morning, played bass with Rick on drums. Back for home-made pizza lunch with N. and E. rested variously, played games with them; fond farewell of N. going back to Loughborough.
  • Caught up with M&D in the evening, and watched a rather weird film.

Saturday
08 February, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-02-08 Saturday

21:00 UTC

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  • Picked up E. from near Ely, and had a nice brunch with J&N&E. at Ben's Yard. Home, sung with N. playing the guitar for a bit, and relaxed with NYT games with J.
  • Watched About Time fun, bed early.

Friday
07 February, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-02-07 Friday

21:00 UTC

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  • Morning calls, contract review, updated blog: renumbering to accomodate missed 31st January.
  • Lunch with Julia, encouraged (trigger warning) to see my old Scout leader finally jailed. Started on the mail backlog.
  • Relaxed by poking some more at performance bits - discovered and filed an unhelpful new DOM element leak. Wondering why my Bitwarden bootstrap-autofill.js is visible in profiling - the plague of autofill it seems - need some more attributes to reduce over-enthusiasm there.
  • N. home for the weekend - so lovely to see her.

Thursday
06 February, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-02-06 Thursday

21:00 UTC

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  • Tech planning call. Poked at a performance problem with Szymon, Caolan & Chris Lord. It turns out doing expensive things in the JS keystroke handler can totally starve the browser of ever achieving anything: fun - not updating avatar images on each keystroke - makes life much better.
  • Worked on a statement of work, and intersecting contractuals through the afternoon - lots of sitting still in one place.
  • Published the next strip:
    The Open Road to Freedom - strip#4 - community road building
  • Dinner, and home group in the evening. Pleased by the Lectio 365 devotional app from 24-7 prayer - somewhat comic intro video.

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La nueva versión principal ofrece un gran número de mejoras en la interfaz de usuario y la accesibilidad, además de las habituales funciones de interoperabilidad

Berlín, 6 de febrero de 2025 – LibreOffice 25.2, la nueva versión principal de la …


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Nova osrednja izdaja ponuja veliko število izboljšav vmesnika in dostopnosti, pa tudi običajnih funkcionalnosti medopravilnosti.

Berlin, 6. februar 2025 – LibreOffice 25.2, nova osrednja izdaja najboljšega odprtokodnega pisarniškega paketa za Windows (Intel, AMD in ARM), macOS (Apple in Intel) in Linux, ki jo podpirajo prostovoljci, je na voljo na naslovu https://sl.libreoffice.org/prenos LibreOffice je najboljši pisarniški paket za tiste uporabnike, ki želijo ohraniti nadzor nad svojimi lastnimi programskimi orodji in dokumenti, da zaščitijo svojo zasebnost in digitalno življenje pred komercialnim vmešavanjem in strategijami povzročanja odvisnosti velikih tehnoloških podjetij.

LibreOffice je edini pisarniški paket, zasnovan na potrebah uporabnika, ne le na pojavni všečnosti. Ponuja številne možnosti vmesnika, ki ustrezajo različnim navadam uporabnikov, od tradicionalnih do sodobnih, in kar najbolje izkorišča zaslone različnih mer, saj optimizira prostor, ki je na voljo na namizju, tako da je čim večje število funkcij le klik ali dva stran. Je tudi edino programje za ustvarjanje dokumentov, ki lahko vsebujejo osebne ali zaupne podatke, a tudi spoštuje zasebnost uporabnikov, s čimer zagotavlja, da se uporabnik lahko odloči, če in s kom je pripravljen deliti vsebino, ki jo je ustvaril, zahvaljujoč standardiziranemu in odprtemu zapisu, ki se ne uporablja kot orodje za povzročanje odvisnosti uporabnikov, ki vsiljuje periodične posodobitve programja. Vse to z naborom funkcionalnosti, primerljivim s tistim vodilnega programja na tržišču in daleč zmogljivejšim od vsega, kar ponujajo preostali tekmeci.

LibreOffice je edinstven zaradi platforme LibreOffice Technology, edine na tržišču, ki omogoča skladen razvoj namiznih, mobilnih in oblačnih različic – tudi tistih, ki jih ponujajo podjetja iz ekosistema – ki lahko izdela identične in povsem združljive dokumente na osnovi dveh obstoječih standardov ISO: odprtem zapisu ODF ali Open Document Format (ODT, ODS in ODP), in lastniški vrsti datotek Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX in PPTX). Slednje v sebi skrivajo mnogo umetne (in nepotrebne) zavezane kompleksnosti, kar lahko povzroča težave uporabnikom, ki so prepričani, da uporabljajo standardiziran zapis.

Končnim uporabnikom je na voljo tudi tehnična pomoč prve ravni prostovoljcev na uporabniških dopisnih seznamih ter spletišču Ask LibreOffice: https://ask.libreoffice.org

Novosti v LibreOffice 25.2


ZASEBNOST

  • Če je potrjena možnost odstranitve zasebnih podatkov pri shranjevanju, se osebni podatki ne bodo izvozili (imena avtorjev in časovni žigi, trajanje urejanja, ime tiskalnika in njegove nastavitve, predloga dokumenta, avtorji in datumi komentarjev ter sledi sprememb).
OSRČJE / SPLOŠNO
  • LibreOffice 25.2 lahko bere in zapisuje dokumente v zapisu ODF različice 1.4.
  • Mnogo izboljšav medopravilnosti z lastniškimi vrstami dokumentov OOXML.
  • Zdaj lahko samodejno podpisujete dokumente, ko določite privzeto potrdilo.
  • Windows 7 in 8/8.1 sta opuščeni platformi in podpora zanju bo odstranjena z različico 25.8.
  • Razširitve in funkcionalnosti, ki se zanašajo na Python, ne delujejo na sistemih Windows 7.
WRITER
  • Izboljšave upravljanja sprememb dokumentov, še posebej

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The new major release provides many user interface and accessibility improvements, plus the usual interoperability features

Berlin, 6 February 2025 – LibreOffice 25.2, the new major release of the free, volunteer-supported office suite for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Linux is available on our download page. LibreOffice is the best office suite for users who want to retain control over their individual software and documents, thereby protecting their privacy and digital life from the commercial interference and the lock-in strategies of Big Tech.

LibreOffice is the only office suite designed to meet the actual needs of the user – not just their eyes. It offers a range of interface options to suit different user habits, from traditional to modern, and makes the most of different screen sizes, optimising the space available to put the maximum number of features just a click or two away.

It is also the only software for creating documents (that may contain personal or confidential information) that respects the user’s privacy, ensuring that the user can decide if and with whom to share the content they create, thanks to the standard and open format that is not used as a lock-in tool, forcing periodic software updates. All this with a feature set that is comparable to the leading software on the market and far superior to that of any competitor.

What makes LibreOffice unique is the LibreOffice Technology Platform, the only one on the market that allows the consistent development of desktop, mobile and cloud versions – including those provided by companies in the ecosystem – capable of producing identical and fully interoperable documents based on the two available ISO standards: the open ODF or Open Document Format (ODT, ODS and ODP) and the proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX and PPTX). The latter hides a huge number of artificial (and unnecessary) lock-in complexities that create problems for users convinced they are using a standard format.

End users can get first-level technical support from volunteers on the user mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: https://ask.libreoffice.org. LibreOffice Writer Guide can be downloaded from https://books.libreoffice.org/en/.

New Features of LibreOffice 25.2

PRIVACY

  • LibreOffice can remove all personal information associated to any document (author names and timestamps, editing time, printer name and configuration, document template, author and date for comments and tracked changes).

CORE/GENERAL

  • LibreOffice 25.2 can read and write ODF version 1.4.
  • Many interoperability improvements with proprietary OOXML documents.
  • It is now possible to automatically sign documents after defining a default certificate.
  • Windows 7 and 8/8.1 are deprecated platforms, and support will be removed in version 25.8.
  • Extensions and features relying on Python will not work on Windows 7.

WRITER

  • Improvements to Track Changes management, to manage large number of changes in long documents.
  • Comments are now tracked in the Navigator when you move the focus into comments, while resizing the area containing comments now shows a visual guide.
  • Added options

Wednesday
05 February, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-02-05 Wednesday

21:00 UTC

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  • Partner call, sync with Dave, catch-up with marketing on content, J. brought lunch, Hack-week round-up call, admin, sales catch-up call, sync with Philippe.
  • Band practice, call with Thorsten, bed.

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LibreOffice at the Univention Summit 2025

The northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein is moving 30,000 PCs from Microsoft Windows and Office to Linux and LibreOffice. At the recent Univention Summit 2025 which took place on January 23 and 24 in Bremen, the LibreOffice project was present and met with the people overseeing the migration.

LibreOffice at the Univention Summit 2025

500 people attended the event, a mixture of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) providers and users from the public and private sectors. Many people who attended the LibreOffice stand were from foundations, state and federal organisations, as well as large companies that have plans to deploy FOSS.

Some of the topics at the stand were the Open Document Format 1.4, integration into third-party software, and training and support. Dirk Schrödter, Schleswig-Holstein’s Minister for Digitalisation, attended the stand and was informed about the upcoming LibreOffice 25.2 release. And the state’s CIO Sven Thomsen also joined us too.

We’re looking forward to following the migration to Linux and LibreOffice, and other federal states and organisations going the same path.

LibreOffice at the Univention Summit 2025

(Image credits: Staatsministerium.SH and Felix Kronlage-Dammers)


Tuesday
04 February, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-02-04 Tuesday

21:00 UTC

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  • Planning call, sync with Miklos & Quikee, catch up with Karen, chewed through E-mail, contract review etc. much of the day. Bed early.

Monday
03 February, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-02-03 Monday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up early, breakfast, got to Midi for the Eurostar to find it was cancelled: odd, paid a lot more money to get onto a later train at a higher class. Back to the Bedford - worked in the lobby interspersed with chatting with passing interesting people.
  • Back to Midi later, train - didn't get fed as expected. Still enjoyed meeting the ex. CTO of Shell - where the CTO's is not per-se an IT geek, but more of a chemical engineer: interesting.
  • Rested where possible, between urgent tasks. Finally home to the family - so lovely to see them, dinner, bed.

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Print editions of several LibreOffice 24.2 user guides were published in 2024. You can buy them from Lulu.com. Free PDFs, as always, are available from the LibreOffice website.

Calc (May 2024)
Impress (July 2024)
Draw (August 2024)
Writer (March 2024)


Sunday
02 February, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-02-02 Sunday

21:00 UTC

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  • Breakfast, to the venue with some friends; pottered around talking to people, spoke briefly in the Government dev-room to lots of friendly faces.
  • Lunch, got chatting in the queue for chips to several interesting people; back to the booth - before heading back and out to Kasbah in the evening - for a mercifully belly-dancing-free meal.
  • Back to chat to Caolan & his lovely daughter - it was bring-a-family-member-to-work weekend, catch up until late.

Saturday
01 February, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-02-01 Saturday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up early, met cool-kids at breakfast; to FOSDEM! Enjoyed talks in the LibreOffice dev-room, and meeting more hackers, partners, team-mates, old-friends and more. Gave various talks.
  • Richer Collaboration in the collaboration dev-room with lots of the latest features to show off:
    Collabora Online - richer collaboration (Hybrid PDF)
  • Also a somewhat different selection of the latest changes on COOL – LibreOffice Technology in the browser in the LibreOffice dev-room as slides.
  • Automatic Documents, packed with content and signed - on Attila & Miklos' recent work:
    Collabora Online - richer collaboration (Hybrid PDF)
  • Talked to people around our table in K, showed off my lack of general cluefulness in the FOSDEM Quiz before heading to Beta Co-working for a pasta dinner & good discussions.
  • On to the XWIKI / Nextcloud party until very late, walked back to bed at 02:30.

Friday
31 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-31 Friday

21:00 UTC

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  • Partner call. EU Open Source Policy Summit all day; lots of smart people around doing great things in FLOSS policy, interesting talks. Spent time socializing an intriguing way of explaining the importance of buying subscriptions from Simon: Pay for what you use, to keep it free.
  • Good to catch up with many, on to the FLOSS foundations dinner afterwards - lots of old friends again.
  • Up extremely until 2am polishing and finishing slides - somehow that can't be avoided.

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LibreOffice QA Team on Matrix-style code background

LibreOffice is used by 200 million people around the world. Every major release goes through extensive testing, with Alpha, Beta and Release Candidate versions – and there are regular monthly minor updates to fix issues too. The QA Team analyses bug reports from users, and here’s an example of how quickly they work when everything goes to plan:

  • 2025-01-21 21:14:02 UTC: Bug report submitted.
  • 2025-01-23 18:16:53 UTC: raal from the QA Team looks at the bug report and rules out Linux.
  • 2025-01-25 06:05:46 UTC: Saburo confirms that the error occurs on Windows. And – which is extremely helpful – finds the commit that has caused the error.
  • 2025-01-25 08:08:16 UTC: raal informs the affected developer.
  • 2025-01-25 09:54:38 UTC: Mike Kaganski provides a bug fix.
  • 2025-01-25 11:35:15 UTC: After the bug fix has been successfully built and tested on all supported operating systems, it is included in the next daily build of LibreOffice.

Learn more about the QA Team, and give them a hand to gain experience in the world of QA


Thursday
30 January, 2025


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-30 Thursday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up earlyish, tech planning call, plugged away at mail and task backlog.
  • Published strip #3 early - two in one week!? a FOSDEM special; explaining open roads:
    The Open Road to Freedom - strip#3 - explaining open roads
  • Meeting with a partner; out to the inaugural ceremony of the European Open Source Awards, talked to smart people until late.

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When you want to interact with users, sometimes simple dialog boxes are sufficient: a simple yes or no, or some info box. But in other cases, you may need more complex message boxes. Here I discuss how to use VCL Weld to create a custom one.

Simple Message Box

You can create a simple message box, using predefined templates like Info box using a code snippet like this:

std::unique_ptr<weld::MessageDialog> xInfoBox(Application::CreateMessageDialog(pParent, VclMessageType::Question, VclButtonsType::YesNo, u"Are you sure?"_ustr));
xInfoBox->run();

And, this is the result, which is very simple, without any title bar:

Yes / No message box

Yes / No message box

There are other predefined types, which can be used in different scenarios:

enum class VclMessageType
{
    Info,
    Warning,
    Question,
    Error,
    Other
};

But, if you want custom message boxes, you should be using weld mechanism, with its CreateBuilder function.

Custom Message Boxes

Below is the code from the source code sfx2/source/doc/QuerySaveDocument.cxx, which is inside sfx2 (framework) module. This dialog box is accessible across different modules, including Writer, Calc and Draw/Impress.

Let’s look into the code:

short ExecuteQuerySaveDocument(weld::Widget* _pParent, std::u16string_view _rTitle)
{
    ...
    std::unique_ptr<weld::Builder> xBuilder(
        Application::CreateBuilder(_pParent, u"sfx/ui/querysavedialog.ui"_ustr));
    std::unique_ptr<weld::MessageDialog> xQBox(
        xBuilder->weld_message_dialog(u"QuerySaveDialog"_ustr));
    xQBox->set_primary_text(xQBox->get_primary_text().replaceFirst("$(DOC)", _rTitle));
    return xQBox->run();
}

The code is using a UI file, named sfx/ui/querysavedialog.ui to create a message dialog, and then change the title of it.

QuerySaveDialog

QuerySaveDialog

If you look into the include file, include/vcl/weld.hxx inside Builder class, you may see functions like weld_… that are suitable to find various different UI elements from the UI, by mentioning the element ID. For example, to find a label with the ID equal to lable_id, you do this:

std::unique_ptr<weld::Label> m_pTextLabel label = m_xBuilder->weld_label(u"label_id"_ustr)

Result

This is the result, when you try to close an unsaved document.

QuerySaveDialog running

QuerySaveDialog running

Alternative Ways

This is not the only way you can create nice dialog boxes using VCL weld mechanism. There are some predefined message boxes that look nice which use weld mechanism, and are available for use via relevant C++ classes.

An interesting one here, is the QueryDialog, which is created by a factory method design pattern.

It uses a predefined dialog, using cui/uiconfig/ui/querydialog.ui as the UI file, and it contains a nice stock image! You can test it easily, by modifying a LibreOffice example, minweld.

IMPL_LINK_NOARG(TipOfTheDayDialog, OnNextClick, weld::Button&, void)
{
    VclAbstractDialogFactory* pFact = VclAbstractDialogFactory::Create();
    auto pDlg = pFact->CreateQueryDialog(getDialog(), u"Tips"_ustr, u"Tip of the day"_ustr, u"Are you sure you want to see the next tip of the day?"_ustr, false);
    sal_Int32 nResult = pDlg->Execute();
    pDlg->disposeOnce();

    if(nResult == RET_YES)
    {
        ++m_nCounter;
        m_pTextLabel->set_label(u"Here you will see tip of the day #"_ustr
+ OUString::number(m_nCounter) + ".");
    }
}

Assuming that you have a working build of LibreOffice, you can simply run the minweld workbench by invoking


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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


[en] Michael Meeks: 2025-01-29 Wednesday

21:00 UTC

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  • Up early, mail chew, call with Dave: growing the TORF forward-log together happily. Packed, partner catch-up. Train(s) to the Eurostar.
  • Met Matthew Wilde on the train - talked XMPP; arrived got some re-fried chips at Bourse; worked on slides and mail until late.

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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

21:00 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
  • Plugged away at calls, slides and admin.

Monday
27 January, 2025


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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

Tuesday
21 January, 2025


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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!

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