Yesterday The Document Foundation (TDF) announced the release of LibreOffice 5.3.3, the latest release of the “fresh” series, which is aimed at early adopters, power users and technology enthusiasts.
For more conservative users and enterprise deployments, TDF suggests LibreOffice 5.2.7, the latest “still” series release, with the backing of professional support by certified professionals.
Compared with its predecessor, LibreOffice 5.3.3 incorporates more than 70 patches, including an update of the Sifr monochrome icon set and several fixes for interoperability with Microsoft Office file formats.
LibreOffice 5.3.3 running on the author’s Debian GNU/Linux laptop
As regards those 70 patches mentioned above, users can see which bugs they’ve help to fix in both release candidates, RC1 and RC2 respectively.
Download LibreOffice
LibreOffice 5.3.3 is immediately available for download for all major platforms – GNU/Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. If your GNU/Linux system can handle Flatpak format, there’s a special link for that.
Support LibreOffice with a donation
As with every release, LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members are invited to support TDF’s work with a donation.
The first bug hunting session for LibreOffice 5.4 – the next major release of this popular free and open source office suite – has been announced on The Document Foundation blog.
LibreOffice 5.4 is due to be released at the end of July with many new features: those already implemented are summarised on the release notes wiki page; and there are still more new features to be disclosed.
The LibreOffice QA team is organizing the first Bug Hunting Session on Friday 28th April to find, report and triage bugs. Testing will be carried out on the first alpha release of LibreOffice 5.4, which will be made available (for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows) on the pre-releases server shortly before the session.
Mentors to help testers report and confirm bugs will be available on 28th April from 8.00 a.m. UTC to 10.00 p.m. UTC. Moreover, as this this particular Alpha release (LibreOffice 5.4.0 Alpha1) will be available until the middle of May, hunting bugs will also be possible on other days.
During the day there will be two dedicated sessions: the first to chase bugs on the main LibreOffice modules between 3.00 p.m. UTC and 5.00 p.m. UTC; and the second to test a set of the top 7 features between 5.00 p.m. UTC and 7.00 p.m. UTC.
Readers may not be aware of it, but the free and open source LibreOffice productivity suite comes in two versions, codenamed “still” and “fresh“; and it’s the “still” branch that concerns us today, with the announcement by The Document Foundation (TDF) of the release of LibreOffice 5.2.6.
LibreOffice 5.2.6 is the sixth minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family and is targeted at businesses and individual users in production environments.
As usual, TDF recommends professional support for large-scale deployments of LibreOffice in major companies and public sector organisations.
LibreOffice 5.2.6 is immediately available for download, whilst the change logs and technical details for both Release Candidate (RC) 1 and RC2 are likewise available.
Users who wish to assist in LibreOffice development can also download pre-release versions from the pre-release server or nightly builds from the dedicated nightly builds server.
Several companies sitting in TDF Advisory Board provide either value-added versions of LibreOffice with Long Term Support or training and migration consultancy services.
Finally, LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members are invited to support The Document Foundation with a donation.
The Document Foundation’s Documentation Team has announced the release of the new Getting Started with LibreOffice guide version 5.2.
The guide has been updated to include developments in LibreOffice 5.2 and previous releases.
The guide is an introductory text for end users using the LibreOffice office suite. It is written for both individuals and organisations using LibreOffice as their preferred office suite. The text allows users to become conversant with the features and resources of LibreOffice.
The guide was produced in LibreOffice Writer in Open Document Format (ODF). The team worked to not only update the contents, but also to tidy up the formatting. This had two objectives: firstly to make the text suitable for computer-aided translation (CAT) tools and secondly to generate an online version (XHTML) of the guide.
The Getting Started with LibreOffice guide, its PDF and ODT versions, can be downloaded or read online by visiting this page, where plenty more documentation on LibreOffice is available.
Yesterday The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 5.3 for Windows, macOS and Linux, as well as for the private cloud for the first time.
LibreOffice 5.3 represents a significant step forward in the evolution of this free and open source office suite: it introduces new features such as online collaborative editing and at the same time provides incremental improvements to make the program more reliable, interoperable and user-friendly.
New features
LibreOffice 5.3 offers a number of interesting new features in every area including:
a new cross-platform text layout engine that uses HarfBuzz for consistent text layout on all platforms, with significant advantages across languages and alphabets;
a revised Help menu, with new quick links to user guides and community support forums; and
better import/export filters for new and legacy MS Office documents.
New features in Writer include:
Table Styles, for applying formatting to a table which is preserved when edited; and
new Go to Page Box (activated by keystrokes Ctrl+G) makes it possible to jump to another page in the document with fewer keystrokes.
LibreOffice 5.3 Writer in action
Turning to spreadsheets, Calc provides a new set of default cell styles, with greater variety and better names than in previous releases, whilst in fresh installations, “Enable wildcards in formulas” is now the default option, rather than regular expressions, to improve compatibility with other spreadsheet software.
Impress, LibreOffice’s presentation package, now opens with a template selector to get the user off to a quick start. In addition, a new Slide Properties Deck is now available in the sidebar while in slide master mode.
As of this release, the LibreOffice UI has been extended with the addition of an experimental Notebookbar, which offers another UI option in addition to the Default UI (with two toolbars), the Single Toolbar UI and the Sidebar with a Single Toolbar. Each UI layout has been thought to serve a different cluster of LibreOffice users.
LibreOffice Online
LibreOffice 5.3 features the first source release of LibreOffice Online, a cloud office suite enabling basic collaborative editing of documents in a browser by re-using the LibreOffice “core engine”.
LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server service and should be installed and configured by adding a cloud storage and a SSL certificate, which are not included in the package.
Builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images.
Availability
LibreOffice 5.3 is available for immediate download (your correspondent has already moved onto an as yet unreleased development version. Ed.).
However, for large scale and commercial deployments, The Document Foundation recommends the more mature 5.2.5 version (posts passim), preferably with professional support.
The Document Foundation (TDF) blog has today announced the release of LibreOffice 5.2.5 “still”, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family and is inviting all users to update to this latest release from LibreOffice 5.1.6 or previous versions.
This latest release comes with over 70 bug fixes and improvements compared with the previous version.
As usual, TDF recommends professional support for large-scale deployments of LibreOffice in major companies and public sector organisations.
Besides this latest release, LibreOffice 5.3, the next version of the more cutting edge LibreOffice “fresh” line, is due out on 1st February.
As is customary with every new release, free software advocates and community members are invited to support the work of The Document Foundation with a donation.
Yesterday the LibreOffice project celebrated its sixth anniversary since the project forked from OpenOffice.org.
Just one day later The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced on its blog the release of LibreOffice 5.2.2, the second minor release of the 5.2 series.
LibreOffice 5.2.2 is targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users and features a number of fixes over the major release announced in August. Those interested in release’s technical details about the release can consult the change log to discover the bugs fixed in RC1 and those fixed in RC2.
For more conservative users and enterprise deployments, TDF recommends using LibreOffice 5.1.5 “still”, complete with the back-up of certified professional support.
LibreOffice developers have released a series of videos to reveal what’s new in the latest release of the free and open source office suite (posts passim).
New features – general
New features – Writer word processor
New features – Calc spreadsheet
New features – Impress presentation software
The release notes for LibreOffice 5.2 are available on the Document Foundation wiki.
Speculation about the demise of Apache OpenOffice may be premature (posts passim).
German IT news site heise reports that a mailing list for new developers has been set up.
By establishing this new list, the OpenOffice team wants to make entry to the open source project easier for programmers.
OpenOffice 4.0- not quite the end of the line, possibly.
After recent discussion of a possible end for the free and open source OpenOffice productivity suite, more developers who are interested in helping with future development have approached the project. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has now established a recruitment mailing list to facilitate their access to the source code. Via the list, newcomers will receive answers to questions and suggestions about their next steps from more experienced developers.
The situation does remind your correspondent of the predicament of one Samuel L. Clemens, better known to the world as the author Mark Twain.
The Document Foundation (TDF) has celebrated the opening session of LibOCon (which is currently taking place in Brno. Ed.) with the announcement of LibreOffice 5.2.1, the latest release of the LibreOffice 5.2 family.
LibOCon is a showcase for the LibreOffice project’s activity and will feature over 60 talks in three days, covering development, quality assurance, localisation, Open Document Format (ODF), marketing, community and documentation, a business session in Czech focused on major LibreOffice deployments, as well as a meeting of the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA).
LibreOffice 5.2.1, which is aimed targeted at technology enthusiasts, early adopters and power users, provides a number of fixes over the major release (5.2) announced in August. For all other users and enterprise deployments, TDF suggests LibreOffice 5.1.5 “still”, with the backing of certified professional support.
Download LibreOffice
LibreOffice 5.2.1 is available for immediate download, whilst LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support the work of The Document Foundation with a donation.
The Document Foundation’s Documentation Team 
