En el mundo digital, los formatos de documentos son esenciales. Los formatos privativos, como DOCX de Microsoft Word o XLSX de Excel, dominan el lugar de trabajo, pero al mismo tiempo obligan a los usuarios a utilizar un proveedor específico …
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En el mundo digital, los formatos de documentos son esenciales. Los formatos privativos, como DOCX de Microsoft Word o XLSX de Excel, dominan el lugar de trabajo, pero al mismo tiempo obligan a los usuarios a utilizar un proveedor específico …
In the digital world, document formats are essential. Proprietary formats such as Microsoft Word’s DOCX or Excel’s XLSX dominate the workplace, but at the same time they lock users into a specific vendor and its business strategies, which tend to exploit users to the maximum in every way. The Open Document Format (ODF) offers an open, standard alternative that protects users and their privacy, promotes interoperability, long-term access and data ownership.
Migrating documents from proprietary formats to ODF is the solution, and although vendors who rely on proprietary formats – not only Microsoft, but also its freeware clones such as OnlyOffice or WPS Office – do everything they can to prevent it, it is very easy and represents a fundamental step forward for users in terms of privacy and digital sovereignty (i.e., ownership of their own content).
This guide breaks down the migration process to make the transition smooth, efficient and sustainable, both at the individual level (where problems are virtually non-existent) and at the enterprise level, where problems exist due to the lock-in strategies of proprietary formats.
Step 1: Understand ODF and its advantages
Step 2: Document inventory to define conversion priorities and estimate the effort required for migration
Step 3: plan the migration workflow
Step 4: Converting documents to ODF format
Step 5: Monitoring the migration
Conclusion
Migrating from proprietary formats to ODF is a strategic move, both individually and for businesses, towards openness, content control and document protection for the future. In a business environment, it requires careful planning and user involvement, but the benefits in terms of flexibility, interoperability and cost savings are well worth the effort.
This post is part of a series to describe how Writer now gets a feature to handle tables that are both floating and span over multiple pages.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but is useful on the desktop as well. See the 11th post for the previous part.
Previous posts described the hardest part of multi-page floating tables: making sure that text can wrap around them and they can split across pages. In this part, we'll look at a conflicting requirement. On one hand, headings want their text to not split across pages (and shapes anchored into paragraphs are considered part of the paragraph, too). On the other hand, it should be OK to have a floating table at the bottom of a page and the following heading to go to the next page.
It turns out, Writer gave "keep together" a priority, while Word gave "floating tables are OK to split to a previous page" a priority.
Note that if you have a shape (e.g. a triangle) and not a floating table, then both Word and Writer prevents the move of that shape to a previous page (if the shape is anchored in a heading); this difference was there just for floating tables.
Here is how the tdf#167222 bugdoc looks like now in Writer:
Floating table, followed by heading: new Writer render
And here is how it used to look like:
Floating table, followed by heading: old Writer render
And here is the reference rendering:
Floating table, followed by heading: reference render
This means that we leave layout for shapes unchanged in general: shapes anchored in headings are still considered to be part of headings and don't split. But for floating tables, we now allow them to split and use space at a previous page if they fit there.
If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)
As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes:
You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 25.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (26.2).
Seguir estas pautas puede mejorar la productividad y garantizar que los documentos sigan siendo coherentes, sólidos y accesibles a lo largo del tiempo, independientemente de la plataforma.
En primer lugar, utilice un editor como LibreOffice que admita el formato de …
LibreOffice 25.8 will be released as final on August, 20, 2025 (check the Release Plan). LibreOffice 25.8 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) brings us closer to the final version, which will be preceded by Release Candidate 3 (RC3). Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.8 RC1, 70 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 34 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 25.8 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 your contribution! Happy testing!!!
…
You know what: Microsoft became miserably incompetent in IT.
I develop open-source code. But that never made me one of the “I hate proprietary software or IT giant corporations” types. I always saw the nice things that Microsoft offered to its users; I saw not only downsides in its products. And I also used (and continue to use) things created by it: Windows to start with (and I develop there, being able to debug and address issues specific to the platform that most of our users use); but also its email service for personal mail.
This Monday, I decided to send something to LibreOffice dev mailing list. Something I do from time to time, you know. Not too fascinating, right?
Well, this time, it turned out, Microsoft decided to teach me to fear them. Thunderbird shown me a message, that the mail couldn’t be sent (well, not a problem: will re-try again…), but then I found myself logged off, with “Your account has been blocked” message. They decided, that I violated their service agreement!
FTR: here is the mail. I was able to send it using another tech giant’s mail service. You may see that it’s full of links. Yes, that’s true; I prefer to provide references to my words. But tell me where was it violating anything in MS agreement?
OK, they have a stupid AI that is worse than good old filters. OK, they made it react immediately, as an undoubted authority. But that’s not a big problem, right? They provide a way to appeal! Let me do that.
And of course, they ask for the phone, and I provide it, just to get a nice reply:
And guess what: there is no other method!
OK! Let’s ask their support. (I am approaching to the point that fascinated me most.) I found a link to “Contact Microsoft Support” on the “Troubleshooting verification code issues” page; and after some automatic answers there, which didn’t answer my problem, I finally got a button telling me … tada …
Yes, you got it right. “Here is a page where we discuss problems signing in. You attempted our FAQ suggestions? You still can’t sign in? No problem! Contact our Support team, and we will solve your problem is a minute! But first, please sign in to continue.”
Heh. I used my wife’s account to contact support. And then I was given a very secret link to an appeal form, where I could file a support ticket. And the next morning, I got a message! Yay! It told me to do something! Let me try! What is that they tell me to do? Reading… hmm… go to sign-in page, and when they tell me that my account is blocked, provide a phone number? Wasn’t it exactly the thing I attempted and failed, and told them about that? But hey, they obviously fixed that problem overnight, they couldn’t just send me the useless instructions, right …
LibreOffice 24.8 ha llegado al final de su vida útil, por lo que todos los usuarios deben actualizar su suite ofimática gratuita a la última versión.
Berlín, 17 de julio de 2025 – The Document Foundation anuncia el lanzamiento de …
LibreOffice 25.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) the third pre-release since the development of version 25.8 started at the beginning of December, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.8 Beta1, 178 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 101 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 25.8 RC1 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!!
…
Writer has some support for interdependent (or hierarchical) tracked changes: e.g. the case when you have a delete on top of an insert. See the first post for background.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.
With the already mentioned improvements in place, a few areas were still lacking: we didn't have UI for all cases where the DOCX import was possible already; combining tracked changes (redlines) were not complete (so you don't have to reject all parts of a logical redline one by one) and some of the undo/redo code didn't work as expected.
Here is a sample case where the UI was missing to create something that was possible to import from DOCX: a format redline on top of an insert redline.
If you had a document with an insert:
Interdependent tracked change: just insert
And you selected BBB to mark those characters as bold, we just updated the existing insert redline to be bold:
Interdependent tracked change: old, format is not tracked separately
But now we track a format change on top of the insert separately:
Interdependent tracked change: new, format is tracked separately
This is also visible if you open the track changes dialog, which explains that now you have part of the insert redline covered by a format redline:
Interdependent tracked change: UI dialog now showing multiple redlines
If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)
As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes. Core side:
You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 25.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (25.8).
por Italo Vignoli
En mi último artículo, mencioné XML varias veces, dando por sentado quizá que todos los usuarios tenían un conocimiento básico del mismo. Al releerlo, me di cuenta de que era necesaria una introducción a XML para …
por Italo Vignoli
Para escribir este artículo, he ido más allá de los límites de mis conocimientos técnicos, que son los de un usuario avanzado que ha estudiado a fondo los formatos estándar y sus características, para entender por qué …
LibreOffice 25.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.8 Beta1 the second pre-release since the development of version 25.8 started at the beginning of December, 2024. Since the previous release, LibreOffice 25.8 Alpha1, 782 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 154 issues got fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 25.8 Beta1 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it can be installed alongside the standard version.
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!!
…
Writer has some support for interdependent (or hierarchical) tracked changes: e.g. the case when you have a delete on top of an insert. While there were some working cases, handling of many combinations were missing. I started to make systematic improvements in this area in the recent past, this post gives you an overview what's done so far.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.
DOCX files in Word can often have overlapping tracked changes: Writer tries to split these up to make sure there is only one tracked change under the cursor at the same time. Still, it's possible that you have a tracked change with multiple types: e.g. a delete on top of an insert.
The focus in on 3 combinations which appear in DOCX files a lot: "insert, then delete", "insert, then format" and "delete, then format".
This mostly affects the UI and import/export filters of ODT and DOCX.
Given an insert, then delete:
Interdependent tracked change: insert, then delete
Most operations worked nicely here, but in case your cursor was in the middle of AAA and you did a reject, followed by an undo, proper handling of that was missing, now implemented.
But then given an insert, then a format:
Interdependent tracked change: insert, then format
Then a handling of more actions were missing:
The combined implementation of these should give you a smooth feeling in case you're used to how Word works: if there is a format redline combined with an insert, then the operations act on the insert type, and format is only accepted/rejected when there is no insert "under" the format.
Similarly: it's a bit of an implementation detail that Writer splits redlines on DOCX import: so if you e.g. accept AAA then we combine that with BBB and CCC when it makes sense, so you need to click a lot less.
Finally, given a delete, then a format:
Interdependent tracked change: delete, then format
Then again handling of some actions were missing:
This deal unites the largest team of corporate Office engineers to deliver on Collabora Productivity’s mission to restore Digital Sovereignty to its users, while making Open Source Office Rock. It supercharges Collabora’s Online Office products and services portfolio with rich German language capability, deeper experience of vertical applications, new Web Assembly skills, and a wider unified partner ecosystem. Through improved product richness this sharpens the competitive edge of FLOSS Office productivity against mass-market proprietary alternatives.
CAMBRIDGE, UK – May 28th 12:00 CEST – 2025
Collabora Productivity, the world’s leading provider of collaborative Open Source Office editors have completed a merger with allotropia. Collabora has invested heavily in building Collabora Online (COOL) – a market leading, on-premise, secure, interoperable, open-source solution for document editing and collaboration deployed to any modern browser. This is complemented by desktop and mobile apps across Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Chrome-OS. Collabora provides support subscriptions to enterprise customers worldwide via a network of hundreds of trusted partners. This is now augmented by allotropia’s partner and customer base. Together with our partners we deliver document and productivity excellence integrated with our partners product and service offerings.
allotropia’s expertise around Web Assembly combined with Collabora Online will we expect, in time, enable customer use-cases such as well as office-as-component embedding scenarios in vertical applications as well as off-line and end-to-end encrypted editing, and. This work builds on some visionary prototype funding from the Bundesministerium des Inneren (BMI) for a collaboration between the companies to enable the use of Collabora Online off-line in the browser.
Further details of product investment, and direction will be announced and decided in workshops with our key customers and partners at our annual COOL Days conference in Budapest next week where staff, community and our customer and partner-ecosystem meet, swap ideas, and hear about the latest work in our upcoming major release featuring improved performance, usability, interoperability and much more.
“Collabora is excited to welcome each member of the allotropia team today!” said Michael Meeks, CEO, Collabora Productivity, “We are excited to work together to accelerate our product development, enjoy our first COOL Days together, and plan the next features and possibilities to delight our customers.”
Collabora has invested in building a network of hundreds of partners and is approaching one hundred million docker image downloads of its document editing server software, with millions of paying users of its products, all of whom will start to benefit from this merger from today.We expect to bring the experience that allotropia has from it’s relationship with CIB around vertical desktop applications (Fachverfahren) to help partners and customers migrate their Windows & Microsoft Office based business process to easy to deploy multi-platform web applications.
“With our awesome team of engineers, and our WebAssembly know how, we can add significantly to Collabora’s powerhouse of Office engineering prowess & their product offerings”, says Thorsten Behrens, CEO of allotropia, “we’ve worked with them as partners for many years, and align perfectly in our goals …
Yesterday I merged a fix for Writer’s tdf#165094. Not that it was something exceptional; something that often happens when we change the huge code: a regression. Something that we try to do for them: a fix. Why mention it here?
It happens to show something, that people underestimate. The complexity of what they call “proper testing” – you know, that “I found a bug! Do you even try to test your software???” rant you often see in discussions. Let’s look at this case.
The problem was, that in some specific document, where there was a manually inserted page break, that page break, defined in a hidden paragraph, disappeared after an upgrade. Sounds easy? Should be caught immediately in the release testing? But other page breaks weren’t lost.
Debugging showed, that the bug would only occur when all of the following happened:
I suppose, that’s a combination of factors, that any QA engineer would naturally test first, don’t you agree? (Disclaimer: no I don’t think so.)
Note that the complexity of this constellation of causing factors is, again, not uncommon in our codebase. In fact, it only needed less than ten features to take their specific forms, from thousands of features and options that the suite offers.
But it is completely unsurprising, that the bug, that requires such a constellation of factors, actually appeared in our bug tracker. Given the tens of millions of users, who work with who knows how many documents, every low-probability event will happen, sooner or later. This is good; and we are thankful to everyone who files bugs.
And let me say, that we at Collabora Productivity are glad to do many good things to make the office suite better for everyone.
LibreOffice 25.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.8 Alpha1 the first pre-release since the development of version 25.8 started at the beginning of December, 2024. Since then, 3918 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 533 bugs were set to FIXED in Bugzilla. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 25.8 Alpha1 can be downloaded for Linux, macOS and Windows, and it can be installed alongside the standard version.
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!!
…
Writer has the concept of rejecting tracked changes: if a proposed insertion or deletion is not wanted, then one can reject it to push back on the proposal. So far such an action left no trace in the document, which is sometimes not wanted. Calling reinstate on a change behaves like reject, but with history: it reinstates the original state, with the rejected change preserved in the document.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.
When Alice works on a document to insert e.g. new conditions for a contract, then perhaps Bob is not happy with the proposal. But just rejecting the change "silently" would not be polite: the tracked change then disappears, so possibly Alice thinks it was accepted and Bob didn't communicate the pushback explicitly in the resulting document, either.
Reinstate is meant to improve this interaction: if an insert is reinstated, then an explicit delete is created on top of the insert, so Alice can see that Bob was not happy with the proposal. Or in case Alice proposed a delete, Bob can reinstate that by adding the same content again to the document, without typing the text manually after the delete.
This is a UI feature: the resulting model still only contains inserts and deletes, so it works even with DOCX files.
Given an insert:
Now you can easily create a delete on top of the insert:
Reinstate: a reinstated insert
And given a delete:
Now you can easily create an insert right after the delete, preserving complex content:
Reinstate: a reinstated delete
As you can see, this creates the opposite of the original change as a new tracked change, so it will in the end still reject the change, but without deleting the original change.
If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)
As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes. Core side:
Online side:
You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 25 …
This FirebirdSQL pull request introduces support for Windows ARM64 builds to the Firebird project. The changes cover updates to build scripts, configuration files, and Visual Studio solution/project files to accommodate ARM64 architecture, ensuring compatibility and enabling compilation and functionality on Windows ARM64 platforms.
This FirebirdSQL pull request introduces SQL-compliant aliases GREATEST and LEAST for the existing MAXVALUE and MINVALUE functions. These aliases align with the SQL:2023 standard and provide a more intuitive and widely recognized syntax. The changes include updates to documentation, keywords, parser tokens, and system function definitions to support these new aliases.
As a LibreOffice user, you have certainly seen the LibreOffice splash screen. It is displayed when you open LibreOffice, it has a progress bar, and when loading the application is finished it goes away. Here we discuss a suggested improvement for this splash screen.
Currently, the splash screen is implemented by creating a custom widget with a custom painting mechanism that draws the splash image and also the progress bar and moves the progress indicator.
This has some drawbacks:
1. The splash screen does not always scale to the same size as the main LibreOffice Window.
2. The style of the progress bar is somehow different from other UI elements, looks mostly like gen interface.
3. It needs and uses a custom paint code.
4. It does not conform to the dark/light theme.
5. It is not easily localize-able. In fact, the only text is from the displayed image, in English. When you build from sources, the image file is instdir/program/intro.png.
LibreOffice splash screen bitmap
6. It is a separate binary (oosplash). You may run it with:
$ ./instdir/program/oosplash
LibreOffice dev splash screen
I have previously written about VCL weld mechanism, which is based on creating user interface files (.ui) and loading them inside the application.
The weld mechanism greatly reduces the complexity of creating user interfaces, and also improves other aspects of the user interface, including the consistency.
Most of the code for the current implementation resides in:
desktop/source/splash/splash.cxx.
The SplashScreenWindow class has an custom paint method, SplashScreenWindow::Paint(), which draws the bitmap, and also the progress. A new UI file is needed for this purpose, which should use GtkProgressBar, which will be considered a weld::ProgressBar. VCL then uses appropriate progress bar widget in different graphical plugins of VCL.
You may look into some dialogs like tip of the day to get some insight:
It would be interesting to avoid a separate binary, but it is fine to keep things as is, and just change to use .ui file.
The above issue is tdf#166128. If you would like to work on fixing it, you can just follow the Bugzilla link to see more information.
You may also use ideas from a minimal weld application here:
Here is the description : "The range-based FOR statement is used to iterate over a range of numeric values. The iteration is performed in increasing order when used with TO clause and in decreasing order when used with DOWNTO clause"Syntax[<label> :] FOR <variable> = <initial value> {TO | DOWNTO} <final value> [BY <by value>] DO &
We are happy to announce the release of Jaybird 6.0.1 and Jaybird 5.0.7. Both releases provide a number of performance improvements to blob handling, and some bug fixes.We plan to offer more blob performance improvements in upcoming releases of Jaybird 5 and 6, for Firebird 5.0.3 and higher (see also New Article: Data access methods used in Firebird).
Writer has the concept of recording tracked changes or not: if recording, typing into a document or deleting content will create tracked changes of type insertion or deletion. So far this was a per-document setting, but now individual users can enable or disable this as they wish.
This work is primarily for Collabora Online, but the feature is available in desktop Writer as well.
When Alice keeps typing and Bob enables change tracking, then surprisingly the typed characters of Alice will form a tracked insertion, which is surprising, since that was not the case a second ago and Alice didn't do anything other than typing.
Giving users a choice if they enable recording for just this user or for all users fixes this problem.
Here is how the per-user (technically per-view) tracked changes recording looks like:
Per-view tracked changes recording
As you can see, the user on the left has recording turned on and this doesn't influence the user on the right, while this was not possible before.
If you would like to know a bit more about how this works, continue reading... :-)
As usual, the high-level problem was addressed by a series of small changes. Core side:
Online side:
You can get a development edition of Collabora Online 25.04 and try it out yourself right now: try the development edition. Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF's next release too (25.8).
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Reinstate: an insert
Reinstate: a delete