Author: Italo Vignoli

Ask LibreOffice serves as a collaborative platform on which LibreOffice users, volunteers, developers, and other community members can come together to ask and answer questions about LibreOffice, TDF, and related matters.

The easiest way to contribute to the Ask LibreOffice site is to hop in and ask or answer questions. If you’re new to the site, or looking for some guidance on how to get the most out of the site, please see: Ask/Getting Started.

Ask LibreOffice is available in several languages, in addition to English.

Bernard John Poole has been an Associate Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Education and Instructional Technology
at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, from 1996 to 2009.

These tutorials for LibreOffice 5.x are designed to help pre-service and in-service teachers learn the suite of free productivity applications included in LibreOffice. But teachers at all levels who need to improve their skills in any of the LibreOffice applications will benefit from working their way through the tutorials. The tutorials are also being used effectively by people who are not teachers, as well as with elementary (5th grade up), middle school, and high school students.

The tutorials, with skill consolidation exercises, cover the essential features of LibreOffice Writer (including mail merge), Calc (including formulas, graphing, charting and Lookup Tables), Base (including reporting), and Impress (including many of the relevant skills that apply to teachers) in the context of the teacher in the K-College classroom. They also include a lesson on LibreOffice Draw.

A step-by-step guide for new developers

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the size and complexity of LibreOffice. The source is written in many different languages and formats — C, C++, Java, Bash, JavaScript, Python, Perl, SQL, Test, XML — and consist of roughly 102,000 files (excluding all localizations) with 36,000,000 lines of text (7,000,000 lines of source code).

Nobody understands the whole code in detail, but we have many core developers who each know part of the code in detail. This step by step guide shows an easy way going from “wanting to contribute” to successfully have the first patch merged to master. If you want help or need more information, please do not hesitate to contact the developer mentoring lead.

LibreOffice uses a time-based release schedule, to produce the best quality free software. A time based release is one that does not wait for either features or bug fixes but is based (as much as possible) on time. This enforces discipline in introducing fixes, gives predictability, and allows more regular releasing. In addition, synchronizing a time-based release schedule with the wider free software ecosystem also offers huge advantages, by getting new features out to users as quickly as possible with a minimum of distribution cycle lag.

As a result, users get new major version every six months with a wide range of features, fixes, and enhancements. In addition, they get many pure bugfix micro releases. The first X.Y.0 release is intended for early adopters. More conservative users are advised to wait for a later X.Y.Z bugfix release.

TDF strongly suggests early adopters and tech savvy users to deploy the latest bleeding edge version (now LibreOffice 5.2.3, and soon LibreOffice 5.2.4), and more conservative individual users and enterprise users to deploy the longer tested previous version (LibreOffice 5.1.6, for enterprise users with the addition of professional support provided by the ecosystem). For testing and quality assurance purposes, though, the project maintains a repository of every older LibreOffice version: https://downloadarchive.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice/old/.

Information on the ODF standard and how to move your organization to ODF-compliant document solutions

The document has been forked in a textual format (Pandoc’s Markdown) by Paolo Dongilli, to keep track of versions and changes, correct typos, add new content and easily fork it for localization purposes. It is available on GitHub: https://github.com/paolodongilli/ODF-Guidance.

This guidance gives general information on the standard, as well as more detailed information for chief technology officers and government procurement officers.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction to Open Document Format (ODF)
2. Procure ODF solutions
3. Base ODF solutions on user needs
4. Validators and compliance testing
5. Platforms and devices
6. Accessibility
7. Privacy and security
8. Avoid macros in documents
9. Integrate ODF with enterprise tools
10. Extensions, plugins and custom solutions
11. Collaborate on documents
12. Change tracking in ODF
13. Embed fonts in ODF documents
14. Corporate styles and templates
15. ODF spreadsheets and formulas
16. Support and training
17. Overview of productivity software
18. Costs and benefits of ODF