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Getting Started Guide 7.5

Appendix B, Open Source, Open Standards, Open Document

Copyright

This document is Copyright © 2023 by the LibreOffice Documentation Team. Contributors are listed below. This document maybe distributed and/or modified under the terms of either the GNU General Public License (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html), version 3 or later, or the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), version 4.0 or later. All trademarks within this guide belong to their legitimate owners.

Contributors

Contributors for this edition:

Peter Schofield

Contributors for previous editions:

Andrew Jensen

Dave Barton

Jean Hollis Weber

Kees Kriek

Olivier Hallot

Peter Schofield

Rafael Lima

Skip Masonsmith

Steve Fanning

Valerii Goncharuk

Feedback

Please direct any comments or suggestions about this document to the Documentation Team forum at https://community.documentfoundation.org/c/documentation/loguides/ (registration is required) or send an email to: loguides@community.documentfoundation.org.

Note

Everything you send to a mailing list or forum, including your email address and any other personal information that is written in the message, is publicly archived and cannot be deleted.

Publication date and software version

Published July 2023. Based on LibreOffice 7.5 Community.
Other versions of LibreOffice may differ in appearance and functionality.

Using LibreOffice on macOS

Some keystrokes and menu items are different on macOS from those used in Windows and Linux. The table below gives some common substitutions used in this document. For a detailed list, see LibreOffice Help.

Windows or Linux

macOS equivalent

Effect

Tools > Options
menu selection

LibreOffice > Preferences

Access setup options

Right-click

Control+click, Ctrl+click, or right-click depending on computer setup

Open a context menu

Ctrl or Control

⌘ and/or Cmd or Command, depending on keyboard

Used with other keys

Alt

⌥ and/or Alt or Option depending on keyboard

Used with other keys

F11

+T

Open the Styles deck in the Sidebar

Introduction

LibreOffice is a productivity suite that is compatible with other major office suites and available on a variety of platforms. It is open source software and therefore free to download, use, and distribute. If you are new to LibreOffice, this appendix will provide some information regarding its history, its community, and some of its technical specifications.

A short history of LibreOffice

The OpenOffice.org project began when Sun Microsystems released the source code (“blueprints”) for its StarOffice® software to the open source community on 13 October 2000. OpenOffice.org 1.0, the product, was released on 30 April 2002. Major updates to OpenOffice.org included version 2.0 in October 2005 and version 3.0 in October 2008. On 26 January 2010, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems.

On 28 September 2010, the community of volunteers who develop and promote OpenOffice.org announced a major change in project structure. After ten years successful growth with Sun Microsystems as founding and principle sponsor, the project launched an independent foundation called The Document Foundation, to fulfill the promise of independence written in the original charter. This foundation is the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where individuals and organizations can contribute to and benefit from the availability of a truly free office suite.

Unable to acquire the trademarked OpenOffice.org name from Oracle Corporation, The Document Foundation named its product LibreOffice. Continuing the version numbers from OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice 3.3 was released in January 2011 and version 7.5 was released in February 2023.

In February 2012, The Document Foundation was incorporated in Berlin as a German Stiftung. You can read more about The Document Foundation at: www.documentfoundation.org.

The LibreOffice community

The Document Foundation’s mission is:

“...to facilitate the evolution of the OpenOffice.org Community into a new open, independent, and meritocratic organizational structure within the next few months. An independent Foundation is a better match to the values of our contributors, users, and supporters, and will enable a more effective, efficient, transparent, and inclusive Community. We will protect past investments by building on the solid achievements of our first decade, encourage wide participation in the Community, and co-ordinate activity across the Community.”

Some of our corporate supporters include GNOME Foundation, Google, Red Hat, and Collabora. Additionally, over 450,000 people from nearly every part of the globe have joined this project with the idea of creating the best possible office suite that all can use. This is the essence of an “open source” community!

With its open source software license, LibreOffice is key in the drive to provide an office suite that is available to anyone, anywhere, for commercial or personal use. The software has been translated into many languages and runs on all major operating systems. New functionality can be added in the form of extensions.

The LibreOffice community invites contributors in all areas, including translators, software developers, graphic artists, technical writers, editors, donors, and end-user support. Whatever you do best, you can make a difference in LibreOffice. The community operates internationally in all time zones and in many languages, linked through the internet at www.libreoffice.org and www.documentfoundation.org.

How is LibreOffice licensed?

LibreOffice is distributed under both the Mozilla Public License (MPL) 2.0 (www.libreoffice.org/about-us/licenses/) and the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 3.0+ (www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-3.0.en.html).

What is open source?

The four essential rights of open-source software are embodied within the Free Software Foundation family of the GNU General Public License (GPL):

The basic idea behind open source is very simple: when programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs.

For more information on Free and Open Source software, visit these websites:

What are open standards?

An open standard provides a means of doing something that is independent of manufacturer or vendor, thus enabling competing software programs to freely use the same file formats. HTML, XML, and ODF are examples of open standards for documents.

An open standard meets the following requirements:

What is OpenDocument?

OpenDocument (ODF) is an XML-based file format for office documents (text documents, spreadsheets, drawings, presentations, and more), developed at OASIS (https://www.oasis-open.org/), an independent, international standards group. OpenDocument version 1.2 was adopted by the International Standards Organization and named ISO/IEC 26300:2015 standard. In December 2019, ODF 1.3 was approved as a committee specification.

Tip

https://www.iso.org/standard/66363.html, https://www.iso.org/standard/66375.html, and https://www.iso.org/standard/66376.htmll.

Unlike other file formats, ODF (ISO/IEC 26300:2015) is an open standard. It is publicly available, royalty-free, and without legal or other restrictions; therefore ODF files are not tied to a specific office suite and anybody can build a program that interprets these files. For this reason ODF is quickly becoming the preferred file format for government agencies, schools and other companies who prefer not to be too dependent on any one software supplier.

LibreOffice 7.5 saves documents in ODF 1.3 Extended by default. LibreOffice can also open and save in earlier versions of the ODF standard, as well as many other file formats, as summarized below.

For a full list of file formats that LibreOffice can read and write, see this Help page:

https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/convertfilters.html

OpenDocument filename extensions

The most common filename extensions used for OpenDocument documents are:

*.odt for word processing (text) documents

*.ods for spreadsheets

*.odp for presentations

*.odb for databases

*.odg for graphics (vector drawings)

*.odc for charts

*.odf for formulas (scientific formulas and equations)

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