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Community Voice: 5 Ways To Make Thunderbird and LibreOffice Better Together

Thunderbird doesn’t come bundled with a great suite of office productivity software, but there are many excellent free and open source applications that work well alongside it. One fantastic example is LibreOffice from The Document Foundation. And just like Thunderbird, it’s open source and multiplatform, available on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

We know that many of you use LibreOffice and Thunderbird as part of your daily workflows. So, how can we make them work better together? We reached out on social media to get your feedback:
https://mastodon.online/@thunderbird/110151140625679579
https://fosstodon.org/@libreoffice/110150592222353571
https://twitter.com/mozthunderbird/status/1644022368270950422
https://twitter.com/LibreOffice/status/1643871918376865794

Thanks a lot to everyone who responded! There were dozens of great ideas, and here are our top five:

1. “A consistent UI/UX could help familiarize newcomers to both tools more quickly… possibly a unified Settings area if you were to combine the functionality of both apps. Include a Thunderbird app launcher in the LibreOffice dashboard.” ~Jay Robbie
2. “Link documents to calendar events or tasks, enabling quick access to relevant files during meetings or when working on projects and create calendar events or tasks directly from within LibreOffice.” ~Briani Davide
3. “What about a better integration of the viewing, editing and exporting capabilities from LibreOffice into Thunderbird for files send via mail? For example, an ODT file can be viewed and edited directly in Thunderbird (without leaving the window) and exported as PDF file.” ~this.ven
4. “For me it would help if both would have the same shortcuts for styling the text. For example Ctrl+1 for Header 1, etc.” ~Johannes
5. “Being able to insert from Thunderbird contacts into LibreOffice while writing, like when you type “@” on Twitter.” ~Fabián Valverde

Let’s make some of these happen! LibreOffice and Thunderbird are community-driven open source projects, so the more help we get, the better the software becomes for everyone.

We’ve set up this meta bug for tracking interoperability and integration, and this page shows how to get involved on the LibreOffice side. If you want to help out from the Thunderbird side, see this page. (And if you’re a business running LibreOffice and Thunderbird, please consider funding developers to work on the features you need.)

Thanks in advance for all help! Let’s make these apps awesome together 😊