LibreOffice Macro Team: progress report

Macros help users to automate common tasks in LibreOffice, and in September, we announced a new team in our community to work on macro support.

So, what has happened in the meantime? This article is a collection of the work done by the LibreOffice Macro Team in the past few months, as well as any other macro-related things in the project. If you are interested in contributing to the macro team (development, testing or documentation), we’d love to hear from you – please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org and we’ll get in touch.

Quality assurance work

Tomoyuki Kubota and Alain Romedenne reorganised the macro meta bug, creating several subcategories for macro issues and feature requests.

Wiki docs

Soon after the announcement of the macro team in early September, we were contacted by Nathan Ullberg, who promptly started contributing to the wiki documentation. Nathan is keeping notes on the progress of his work on his wiki user page. Alain is collaborating with Nathan on the wiki effort, which includes creating new articles with example macros, reviewing old ones and translating them from French to English.

Code contributions from macro team members

Tomoyuki Kubota:

• Optional macro parameter defined as Integer has type Variant/String causing type errors in the macro

Andreas Heinisch:

• Instruction Cint fails when converting Hex strings of a negative value to a 16-bit integer value

• Wrong type of function GetLastUsedRow (standard library Tools, module Misc)

• When opening a macro, allow searching a module/function name by typing the first letter

Alain Romedenne:

• Test case for Property Get/Let Basic Statement

Code contributions from honorary associate members

Mike Kaganski (Collabora):

• Only check closing parenthesis when in IDE

Stephan Bergmann (Red Hat):

• In checkUnoObjectType, check for derived-from types too

Samuel Mehrbrodt (CIB):

• Fix option to disable macros

• Infobar should have a UNO API

Help content

Improved by Alain Romedenne:

• LibreOffice Python Scripts Help

• Events

• LBound Function

• ThisComponent Object

• StarDesktop object

• GlobalScope specifier

• UNO Objects, Functions and Services

• Hex Function

• Type Statement

Improved by Olivier Hallot (TDF):

• VBA Properties

Added by Olivier Hallot (TDF):

• Calling Python Scripts from Basic

Finally, we have to highlight Alain’s presentation from the LibreOffice Conference 2019: Scripting LibreOffice Python macros, aka “Macros Well Kept Secrets”:

Big thanks to everyone for their contributions and special thanks to Alain for coordinating things and being a tireless macro educator! As mentioned, everyone is welcome to join our efforts to improve macro support in LibreOffice – you don’t need to be a developer. Help us with documentation, bug reports and more – and gain valuable experience on the way!