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Author: Mike Saunders

The Month of LibreOffice, November 2016: One week in

Last week we started a new Month of LibreOffice, where contributors to the project can win badges for their work. Every bit of help, whether in coding, documentation, QA, translations or user support, is really appreciated! So far we’ve awarded 89 badges across various teams.

Want to get one for yourself? Just see this page for how to get involved, and then have your name alongside a badge you can use on your blog, social media, or indeed anywhere else you want to show it off!

Meanwhile, at the moment only two barnstars have been awarded – so let’s bump that number up! If there’s anyone in the LibreOffice community you want to thank for their efforts, just email barnstars@libreoffice.org with their name and what they did, and we’ll add them to the page. So get in touch!

LibreOffice Community Weeks: Wrapping up

LibreOffice Community Weeks

We’re already in to a new Month of LibreOffice, but in October we ran a series of Community Weeks, looking at what different teams in the LibreOffice project do, and how you can help them. So firstly, here’s a reminder of the articles, and then we’ll find out what effect they had…

Documentation

Development

Quality Assurance (QA)

Design

 

Feedback from the teams

So what effect did the Community Weeks have on the projects? Here’s what each team had to say:

Olivier Hallot (documentation): “The Community Weeks brought more people to the realm we are working in, and I had 3 new people showing up. One is a PhD professor from a university in India, who wrote a page on a set of Calc functions, and asked for more work. Another is a New Zealand national, involved in migrations and support, who is updating our books. I also got someone on IRC, but he did not came back. So overall, the week is positive, but we need people to return after their first contributions.”

Jan Iversen (development): “The week worked well – during the last period 15 people have got their first patch merged, and will appear by name in the 5.4 release notes. I often hear “but I cannot work full-time”, so it is important to realize that while roughly 50% of the changes are done by 20-30 people, the other 50% is done by hundreds of people making 1-10 patches a year. Every change counts and is very welcome! We arrange developers days, when a group wants help, so please contact us at mentor@documentfoundation.org if you need help.”

Xisco Fauli (QA): “There were 4-5 new users who showed up on IRC during the Bug Hunting Session, who may have joined from reading the Community Week posts. Also, we hope both posts from that week will help readers to report better bugs in the future (attaching simpler samples, adding clearer steps, and so forth).”

Heiko Tietze (design): “The campaign was interesting and encouraged readers to follow links to the Design Team Blog. Even if we didn’t get more active people showing up in the design project, comments are always welcome.”

Thanks to everyone who took part. We’ll do more Community Weeks next year, so if there’s something you want us to focus on, just let us know!

The November 2016 Month of LibreOffice begins!

Back in May we had a Month of LibreOffice, crediting contributions to the software across the entire project. It was fantastic, with hundreds of badges and barnstars awarded to developers, translators, bug reporters, and also to people who help with documentation, the Ask.LibreOffice site and social media.

Well, it’s time to do it again! Read on and learn how to award barnstars and collect badges…

Barnstars

If you’re involved in the LibreOffice community and want to show your appreciation for someone’s efforts, award them a barnstar on our special wiki page. This is a bronze, silver or gold icon that shows your thanks for that person’s help or contribution, like so:

To award a barnstar, just email barnstars@libreoffice.org, say who should get it and what they did. We’ll then add it to the page.

Badges

Meanwhile, LibreOffice contributors can earn badges throughout the month. They look like this:

We’ll add every contributor to the list of badges on our wiki. Everyone who earns a badge can proudly show it off on their blog or social media accounts! At the end of the campaign we’ll make a high-score list for the contributors who earned the most badges.

How do I get a badge?

There are six badges covering many aspects of LibreOffice:

  • Help to confirm bugs: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 5.2.2”. (Make sure you’re using the latest version of LibreOffice.)
  • Contribute code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started. Once you’ve submitted a patch, if it gets merged we’ll award you a badge!
  • Translate the interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.
  • Write documentation: Another way to earn a badge is to help the LibreOffice documentation team. Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.
  • Answer questions from users: Over on Ask LibreOffice there are many users looking for help with the suite. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you’ll get a shiny badge to add to your collection.
  • Spread the word: Tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and we’ll award you with a badge.

Can you get all six badges? Good luck!

So let’s go

The campaigns run until the end of the month, so you have around four weeks to award barnstars (or earn them!) and pick up badges for your contributions. We’ll be posting regular updates on our Twitter account, and of course keep an eye on the wiki pages to see the progress. Stay tuned!

Coming up: a new Month of LibreOffice

Back in May we had a Month of LibreOffice, celebrating contributions from the community across many different teams – development, documentation, translations, QA, marketing and more. Well, six months have almost passed so it’s time for another! We’ll be running a new Month of LibreOffice throughout November, crediting contributors for their work.

As with May’s campaign, you’ll be able to win badges for submitting patches, translating strings, confirming bugs and doing other tasks that help the LibreOffice project. In addition, other contributors can award you barnstars for your work. Collect badges and barnstars and proudly show them on your blog and social media – or even your CV if you’re looking for a new career!

So stay tuned, and we’ll explain more in the next few days. In the meantime, see here for the 341 badges awarded in May, and this page for the barnstars.

Community Week: Design – get involved

LibreOffice Community Weeks

Earlier this week we talked to Heiko Tietze, LibreOffice’s user experience (UX) mentor, and then looked at some of the changes that the Design team has made in recent releases of the suite. You’ve seen that even the smallest updates to the interface can have a significant effect, and the Design team is always looking for new ideas and contributions. So read on to learn how you can get involved and make LibreOffice better for everyone.

1. Check out the design guidelines

When new features are added to LibreOffice, the Design team works to ensure they fit into the guidelines. These guidelines are part of an overall vision for LibreOffice on the desktop, which is: “Simple for beginners and powerful for experts”. Making software that appeals to both type of user is a challenging task, as workflows can vary so much. But if you read the UX manifesto you can see how this is achieved.

2. Submit bug reports and suggestions

Have you found a user interface bug in LibreOffice, or an issue that violates the guidelines? Learn how to submit bug reports so that the Design team can investigate them and work on fixes. Alternatively, if you have a suggestion for improving usability in the suite, you can submit an enhancement request on the bug tracker. Of course, the more detail you provide, the better: saying “Feature X is hard to use” isn’t helpful, but “Feature X could be improved by adding Y to Z or moving A to B” is much better. And you could even add a mock-up to show how you think an improvement would be implemented.

3. Start communicating

The Design team is active on social media, with a Twitter account, Google+ page and blog. Some activity takes place on the #libreoffice-design IRC channel on Freenode (webchat link), but it’s also worth signing up to the mailing list. Don’t miss the weekly Hangouts meetings on Friday – see here for details and minutes of the last meeting.

So with October coming to a close, that’s it for the Community Weeks! We hope you enjoyed reading about the different teams and projects involved in LibreOffice, and got a sense for what they all do. Most of all, we hope you’re encouraged to get involved – not only would your help be good for LibreOffice and free software in general, but participating in a well-known open source project is also good for your CV and future career. So join us!

Community Week: Design – recent changes, and communication

LibreOffice Community Weeks

On Monday we talked to Heiko Tietze who is LibreOffice’s user experience (UX) mentor, and today we’re going to look at some changes that the Design team has implemented in recent releases of the suite. You can see how new features are implemented to make them accessible without drastically changing the overall design of the software.

Single toolbar mode

In LibreOffice 5.2, Writer and Calc received new single toolbar modes. These provide alternatives to the default double toolbar configuration, and save screen space while helping users to really focus on their work. Click here to see the initial discussion and mockups that led to this design change.

Currency drop-down button

Here’s an example of a user interface change that barely takes up any screen space, but has a big impact on overall usability. Before LibreOffice 5.2, a single toolbar button was available for setting a currency format, but this button now has a drop-down menu to change between currencies. This only adds a few pixels on to the width of the toolbar, but it means users can quickly switch currencies without having to go into the menus.

Fine-tuning control points

It’s often useful to add multiple ways to achieve something, providing they don’t add clutter or too much redundancy. Take working with enhanced shapes, for instance: before LibreOffice 5.1, users customised shapes using the mouse on yellow handles and control points. But after 5.1, it’s possible to manipulate the exact positions of those control points with numbers. So some users will still prefer to do it manually with the mouse, but those who need exact position have the option as well.

Spreadsheet function tooltips

Some user interface changes aren’t just about making features accessible or speeding up workflows, but also making the software more intuitive. LibreOffice 5.2 introduced tooltips for functions in Calc, so that users can get a quick overview of what they do whilst typing them. This helps newcomers to get familiar with the software and reminds experienced users of what a function does without having to go through the help system.

 

Feedback from the design team – and have your say

The Design team strives to communicate its changes clearly and effectively to the wider LibreOffice community, and maintains a blog for this purpose. So if you’ve ever spotted a difference in the user interface between LibreOffice releases and you’re not sure why it happened, it’s worth reading the blog to get an explanation.

For instance, here are some recent blog posts describing the background to changes in recent and coming releases:

The blog is also used to propose changes and get feedback. If you have an opinion on something, let the team know in the comments! Here are some recent posts:

That’s it for today – join us on Friday when we’ll show you how to get involved with the Design team and help to make LibreOffice’s interface better with every release.

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