Hispanic LibreOffice Community: Fourth virtual meeting

Daniel Armando Rodriguez writes:

On Saturday August 22, in the Ibero-American afternoon/evening, the Hispanic Community met for the fourth consecutive month with panelists who covered several topics related to the office suite par-excellence in the FLOSS world.

The event was broadcast live on YouTube and Facebook. The activity began at 16:00 UTC, extended for almost 4 hours and presented speakers of 6 nationalities recognized for their participation and collaboration in the project. All the talks are available on the LibreOffice Hispano channel.

  • Ismael Fanlo, from Spain, presented the work with sections in Writer.
  • Celia Palacios and Jazmín Hurtado, from Mexico, talked to us about social service at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México and LibreOffice.
  • Daniel Rodriguez, from Argentina, spoke about the use of alternative fonts.
  • Xiomara Céspedes, from Costa Rica, gave a presentation on Mail Merge.
  • Ameck Bozo, from Venezuela, showed how to work with Linear Regressions in Calc.
  • Emiliano Gonzalez, from Spain, spoke about Base: Forms / Reports, HSQLDB / Firebird.
  • Klaibson Ribeiro, from Brazil, gave a talk on the Integration of Zotero with Writer.
  • Andrea Navarro, from Argentina, presented the creation and management of thesis and final works with LibreOffice.

This was, of course, an open event – free and aimed at anyone who is interested in knowing a little more about LibreOffice. Also, we thank our friend Servio Paladines from the Latin Community of Free Technologies, who managed the live broadcast.

Community Member Monday: Tomáš Chvátal

Today we’re talking to Tomáš Chvátal from the Czech LibreOffice community, who recently decided to become a Member of The Document Foundation…

To start, tell us a bit about yourself!

I am from Prague, Czech Republic, where I work for SUSE as a Team Lead for software development/packaging. For SUSE and openSUSE I am responsible for the LibreOffice packages, and ensure they are built and delivered for everyone.

In my spare time I play with my parrots, read books and generally just slack around 🙂

Why did you decide to become a member of TDF?

I think the ability to open documents – created wherever and however – should not be limited by having to pay to view the content. For instance, when you’re communicating with the government, you should not be tied to paid services, and there should be no hurdles for anyone.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

Mostly making sure the package is fresh and crispy on the openSUSE and SUSE stack, and fixing all the reported issues found by the users.

SUSE has a partnership with Collabora Productivity, and as such we also fix various compatibility issues between Microsoft Office and LibreOffice to make it easier for people to switch to free (and better :P) alternatives.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

I do not really radically plan to change my contributions. Put simply, I will keep making sure that LibreOffice keeps working, and whenever the current pandemic boils over, promote The Document Foundation at conferences again.

Thanks to Tomáš for all his contributions! Everyone who’s active in the LibreOffice community is welcome to join The Document Foundation, and help to shape the future of the software:

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Nominations still open for TDF’s Membership Committee!

Are you a Member of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice? Want to get more involved in the foundation, and help to shape its future? Apply to become part of the Membership Committee (MC)!

By being part of the MC, you can work with the people at the core of the LibreOffice community: the TDF members. It’s also a good chance to understand how the international community and foundation works behind LibreOffice, the leading FOSS office suite. Learn more about the current MC here.

So, if you want to nominate yourself (or someone else!), you have until August 27. Full details about the process are here.

We look forward to your applications!

openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference Talks Accepted

Talks submitted for the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference have been reviewed and accepted by the conference organizers.

The approved talks have been updated in the Open Source Event Manager instance on events.opensuse.org.

The organizers thank everyone who took the time and effort to submit a talk for the conference.

Speakers have until Sept. 6 to confirm their talk/s for the conference on events.opensuse.org. Speakers will need to login, click on My Proposals and will have an option to confirm the accepted proposal. There is also a withdraw proposal option.

People who have issues logging on to confirm their talk may have not realized the openSUSE went through a migration and users might need to migrate their account following the steps on https://idp-portal-info.suse.com.

The events.opensuse.org website is used to manage talk submissions, scheduling of talks and registrations, but there will be an online live conferencing platform where the conference will take place online from Oct. 15. – 17.

More information will follow in the coming weeks about the tool and how to navigate it.

Attendees will be able to customize their schedule by adding sessions they would like to participate in once the platform is ready.

The conference will have technical talks about LibreOffice, openSUSE, open source, cloud, containers and more. Extra time for Questions and Answers after each talk is possible and the talks will be recorded. The conference will schedule frequent breaks for networking and socializing.

Organizers have online, live conference sponsorship packages available. Interested parties should contact ddemaio (at) opensuse.org for more information.

Community Member Monday: Pulkit Krishna

Today we’re talking to Pulkit Krishna, who’s a new member of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. He’s also active in our documentation community…

Hi Krishna! Tell us a bit about yourself…

I am from Bihar, India. I am a teacher by profession, and technical writing is my hobby.

Why did you decide to become a member of TDF?

In my country, very few people know that there are other office suites than Microsoft Office. They do not know that there is a suite that’s free and open source software. I am not talking about everyone – but the majority of people.

By becoming a member, I think I can help to spread the word, that there is a very good free office suite, LibreOffice. Also, almost everybody in my country thinks that to become a part of a software community, you have to be a developer. I want to remove this stereotype. I am not a developer and yet I am a member of TDF.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

Currently, I am working on updating the Base Guide to version 6.4. The base guide 6.2 was translated from German, but for version 6.4 we are updating it from 6.2. It is going to be a quick update, because Base has not changed much.

Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice really need right now?

As the Base Guide 6.2 was translated from German, its English could be improved. Also, there are some translation mistakes. I plan to rewrite the whole guide for 7.0. The screenshots in the guide are old – they need to be updated. I am going to use the format suggested by Dan Lewis.

In the future, I would also like to spread the word about LibreOffice in my country. Although the government has declared that free and open source software should be promoted, very few people in my country even know that such a thing exists.

Thanks, Krishna! Indeed, our marketing community is reaching out and spreading the word – everyone is welcome to join and give us a hand!

LibreOffice 7.0: A week in stats

One week ago, we announced LibreOffice 7.0, our brand new major release. It’s packed with new features, and has many improvements to compatibility and performance too. So, what has happened in the week since the announcement? Let’s check out some stats…

422,938 downloads

These are just stats for our official downloads page, of course – some Linux users will have acquired the new release via their distribution’s package repositories.

113,235 hits for the press release

Our press release was viewed by people from around the world, and linked to by many websites. We also sent the PR to our announce mailing list, and it was translated into many languages thanks to our awesome localisation community.

54,079 Tweet impressions

The announcement Tweet was viewed almost 55,000 times, and had 763 likes and 508 retweets. We’re also on Mastodon, a FOSS-friendly federated microblogging service: our Mastodon toot had 79 likes and 97 shares. Meanwhile, the Facebook post reached 21,786 people, with 817 reactions and 181 shares.

48,874 video views

Our LibreOffice 7.0 New Features video has been popular, with 130 comments and 1,353 likes. (We also uploaded the video to PeerTube, an open source, decentralized and federated video platform.)

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1509 upvotes on Reddit

As always, we posted the announcement on the /r/linux subreddit, where it had 1509 upvotes and 250 comments. We also have our own dedicated /r/libreoffice subreddit – check it out!

A huge thanks to our worldwide community of volunteers, and certified developers, for all their work on this release! LibreOffice keeps moving forward, and this release really cements its position as the future of OpenOffice: