The Calc module of LibreOffice is one of its most complex and extensive applications and one of the most in-demand for documentation, as our measurements of the documentation website clearly show.
The latest published Calc Guide is connected to LibreOffice release 4.1. The gap between this guide and the most recent Calc developments has widen and the current publication is outdated. (more…)
Plan of National Chi-Nan University to Stop Purchasing Microsoft Office from 2018 Raises Heated Discussions in Taiwan
April 23, 2017, Taiwan – The migration of ODF keeps going in many different fields in Taiwan. Since 2016 the Ministry of Education in Taiwan entrusts the Information Service Association of Chinese Colleges (ISAC) and Software Liberty Association Taiwan (SLAT) with the task of promoting and migrating ODF/LibreOffice in universities in Taiwan. Among all the university, National Chi-Nan University (NCNU) is the earliest one, which started migrating LibreOffice since 2014 and has been working on it for three years.
Then on April 20, 2017, a student from NCNU posted an article on Dcard forum saying that, according to her teacher, NCNU “Will not use Microsoft Office anymore due to the budget issue. LibreOffice will be used to replace Microsoft Office.” The student strongly questioned, “LibreOffice is totally unknown to everyone. I don’t know what the administrative staffs of our school are thinking about. Microsoft’s software is a very basic skill for enterprises to recruit people. This decision will make students lost their core competitiveness.”
This article raised heated discussion on the Internet. Some people questioned the NCNU about the usage of the budget, saying that such a big national university may never lack the budget to buy Microsoft licenses. Also, there were still a number of people questioning about the interoperability between LibreOffice and OOXML. However, more people disagreed with the student’s thoughts about “Microsoft equals core competitiveness.”
Ben Jai, a famous entrepreneur and public opinion leader in Taiwan, said on his Facebook page: “For a student, it should be more important to actively explore new things rather than waiting for someone to teach him. If he just waits for teachers to teach him how to use a tool and plans to use the tool all his life, he will be very easily eliminated.”
Matthew Lien – a.k.a. BlueT in open source communities in Taiwan – who was one of the main promoters of LibreOffice in NCNU, explained the policy on Facebook: “The budget is just one of the reasons but not all. The budget of schools should invest on students and education, but the Microsoft’s license fee is going higher and higher and starts to supplant budgets of other items. Therefore, we’ve worked on promoting ODF and LibreOffice for three years. It’s not an impulsive decision. BTW, we won’t forbid anyone to use Microsoft Office, just that NCNU won’t purchase Microsoft Office anymore.”
Another article on The Inside Media discussed this topic and gave a conclusion by asking this question: “Maybe Microsoft Office has been the basic skill of many enterprises. However, why our education only teaches our students a single tool, instead of training our students to learn and adopt new skills actively?”
Last year we had two Months of LibreOffice, in May and November. These celebrated contributions all across the project, from development and documentation through to translations and QA. Everyone who got involved was awarded a badge to use on websites and social media.
This year, though, we’re taking it up a notch. For the first Month of LibreOffice, starting on Monday 1st of May, we’re giving out real printed stickers to all contributors! And they look like this (printed versions on the way):
Yes, if you help the LibreOffice project during May, you’ll be able to claim a shiny sticker for your laptop, desktop or other kit at the end of the month. You’ll just need to let us know your address and we’ll pop a sticker in the post. Then you’ll be able to show the world not only that you love LibreOffice, but that you’re a proud contributor as well!
So, how do you get a sticker? Stay tuned to this blog – on Monday we’ll provide all the details and the campaign will get started. See you then…
The LibreOffice community tries to make the software as accessible as possible – in other words, usable for people with special needs or requirements. Alex Arnaud is working to make the suite more accessible for users with visual impairments, and discusses his experiences and the challenges ahead in our latest interview…
Where are you from, and if you’re active on IRC, what’s your nickname?
I am French, and my IRC nickname is “alexarnaud”.
Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just work on it in your spare time?
Alongside the Hypra team, I am based in Paris. I am visually impaired and I use my computer with a screen magnifier and a screen reader. I use, on a daily-basis, the Universal Accessible OS (UAS) based on Debian GNU/Linux both for my professional and personal needs. I used GNOME before (and its magnifier), but given the important efforts that Hypra has poured into this project and the constant improvement of the, I have decided to switch about a year ago.
I’ve been working at Hypra since September 2015 as a project manager, leading the development of the visual-assistance stack (Compiz). I soon intend to join the company as a shareholder as I feel now totally involved in the startup’s ambition: making accessibility a key competitive advantage for Linux, and ultimately expanding the benefits of free software to the general public, beginning with visually impaired people. LibreOffice being one of the cornerstones of free software, I am contributing to the LibreOffice community inside the quality assurance (QA) team, mostly on my working time.
How did you get involved with LibreOffice?
When joining Hypra, my blind friends and colleagues Jean-Philippe and Raphael kept telling me: “Since version 4.3, LibreOffice is regressing on accessibility for blind people”. So far so good – we provide version 4.2 for our customers because it is actually the latest version usable for blind and visually impaired people. But we deem such an evolution is not sustainable on the long-run.
That is why we have decided to get involved, beginning with an accessibility audit on the user side. I’ve looked into all the LibreOffice bugs related to GNU/Linux and accessibility, and checked their validity and updated them as a consequence.
After that I started to become an accessibility bug hunter for the LibreOffice QA team and I have reported lots of bugs related to Writer, Calc and Impress. I see myself as a kind of “whistle-blower” about accessibility inside the community. Most of the sighted-users do not know that software has to be accessible for all people, so my job is raising awareness and hence trying to be a driver of change.
What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?
My initial experience with LibreOffice was in 2011. I reported bugs about the accessibility of LibreOffice for Windows – I sent them directly in a mailing list. In 2011, on Windows, it was completely impossible to use LibreOffice with a screen magnifier so I chose to use IBM Lotus Symphony, which was usable for a low-vision person.
What areas of the code do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?
I am a user of the Orca screen reader (the screen reader being also useful for large array of people from the elderly to the visually impaired), so I can easily check if something is accessible for everyone. I focus on the user interface and the communication of LibreOffice with assistive technologies through the AT-SPI2 protocol.
I’m only working on the user side because I don’t know how to compile and how to debug LibreOffice – I just know QA-related things like how to check which version introduces a regression, for example. Testing and reporting bugs is huge work that requires attention and patience. I spent most part of my time tracking features and verifying whether they are usable for disabled people.
What is your vision for the future, or what would you most like to see improved in LibreOffice?
Free software entails a huge ethical and philosophical promise. It drives many expectations and hopes for average users in terms of social inclusion and privacy. It also provides enormous opportunities to reshape the relationships people have with technologies, focusing more on training and support, rather than on the cost of technologies themselves. This is a driver for social change. But to cope with these expectations, I believe we have to make sure that LibreOffice, being one of the cornerstones of free software, enables social inclusion.
Why should we keep adding features if we haven’t them usable for all? Can we accept it if a mainstream project such as LibreOffice keeps excluding people? As a matter of fact, I’ve noticed that there are accessibility bugs, originally coming from the OpenOffice.org code, that were reported more than 5 fives years ago… We can’t let the status quo prevail!
What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?
I spend most of my spare time reading books and listening to radio podcasts to discover more in depth about how the world works. I’m fascinated by Noam Chomsky’s point of view about democracy and information. I find his famous book “Manufacturing Consent – The Political Economy of the Mass Media” extremely clarifying about the role of the media industry in a democratic country.
I also appreciate spending time with other people, with my family and with my friends.
What was the very first program you wrote?
If my memory serves me well, it was a very little social network.
Which is your preferred text editor? And why?
I’ve been using Emacs as my primary text editor since the day I discovered it. It’s really a pleasure for me to work with it because it help me to overcome my vision troubles.
In fact, I use a screen magnifier program that follows the cursor position. In some programs like “man”, “less” and “more” I can’t move the cursor inside the text – and that forces me to use the mouse, which makes my work more difficult.
With Emacs I can read manual pages inside a buffer, and I can use a command-line and move inside it – it is so convenient for me!
Why would you say there are few bug reports related to accessibility on GNU/Linux?
I would forward you to an interesting message posted years ago by Samuel Thibault (main contributor of the Debian accessibility team). For a blind person, if an application is not accessible enough it is completely impossible to report a bug.
Regular users that have disabilities spend more time than people without them, just to do things in their life. Information technology is a bridge between inaccessible hard things (newspaper, administrative things, TV programs, etc) and the accessible digital world.
It is really indispensable for blind people – for example – to be efficient in their lives when finding information related to their city, communicating with people by e-mail (letters are inaccessible), finding their path with GPS, producing and reading documents, finding a job of course – and so much more!
I have a dream: we work on free software, especially in this case LibreOffice, and everyone can work on the accessibility side and improve the life of everyone else. We need more manpower! Here’s a link to the meta-bug related to accessibility stuff on GNU/Linux.
I’m often available on IRC (Freenode network) on the channel of the libreoffice-design team (#libreoffice-design). Please ping me if you have questions relating to accessibility.
Thanks to Arnaud for his time and in-depth answers. For those reading this who want to get involved and help to make LibreOffice more accessible, join us today!
The Document Foundation has enabled us to visit the Univention Summit in Bremen, so here is our report
Univention’s primary product is the Univention Corporate Server (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univention_Corporate_Server#App_Center). UCS combines various free software applications into a comprehensive server platform based on Debian GNU/Linux.
The goal of the summit was networking in the field of open source software and, of course, to popularize UCS. This package is used by companies, administrations, and schools – and we (coming from the south of Germany) noticed that the new version of the paedML, the educational sample solution at the schools of Baden-Württemberg, runs on the basis of UCS. Accordingly, pedagogy was a focus of this meeting, in addition to a technology track and a series of app programming. There were also lectures on this central question: how should school IT structure look now and in the future? Several members of the host company and media representatives from schools, municipalities and federal states, including the Senator for Children and Education in Bremen, who played a major role at the beginning of the development of UCS between 2002 and 2004, spoke about this question.
LibreOffice played a role in many lectures and discussions – because it is open and free, but also because the resistances are often (still) great. The entire program and the presentations can be found at https://www.univention-summit.de/programm/ or via http://en.slideshare.net/Univention. There were more than the originally announced 250 visitors present, and this high number (in addition to the plans of the federal government for a €5 billion nationwide support program for IT in schools) shows the importance of this conference.
Besuch des Univention-Summits 2017
Die TDF hat uns den Besuch des Univention-Summit in Bremen ermöglicht, deshalb hier unser Bericht
Das Hauptprodukt von Univention ist der Univention Corporate Server (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univention_Corporate_Server#App_Center). UCS vereint verschiedene freie Softwarepakete in einem umfassenden Server-Betriebssystem auf Basis von Debian GNU/Linux.
Ziel des Summits war das Netzwerken im Bereich der Open Software und natürlich die Bekanntmachung von UCS. Dieses Paket wird von Unternehmen, Verwaltungen und Schulen eingesetzt – besonders fiel uns auf, dass die neue Version der paedML, der pädagogischen Musterlösung an den Schulen Baden-Württembergs, auf der Basis von UCS läuft. Entsprechend war ein Schwerpunkt dieser Tagung (neben einem Technik-Track und einer Reihe über App-Programmierung) ein Pädagogik-Track mit Vorträgen z.B. der Senatorin für Kinder und Bildung in Bremen, deren Amt schon am Beginn der Entwicklung von UCS zwischen 2002 und 2004 eine wichtige Rolle spielte. Zentrale Frage: Wie muss die schulische IT-Struktur jetzt und in Zukunft aussehen? Zu dieser Frage äußerten sich einige Mitglieder der gastgebenden Firma und Medienbeauftragte von Schulen, Kommunen und Bundesländern.
LibreOffice spielte in vielen Vorträgen und Diskussionsbeiträgen eine Rolle – weil es offen und gratis ist, aber auch, weil oft die Widerstände dagegen (noch) groß sind. Das gesamte Programm und die Vorträge finden sich unter https://www.univention-summit.de/programm/ oder alternativ über http://de.slideshare.net/Univention. Es waren mehr als die angekündigten 250 Besucher anwesend und diese hohe Zahl zeigt (neben den Plänen der Bundesregierung für ein 5 Milliarden schweres bundesweites Unterstützungsprogramm für die IT an Schulen) die Bedeutung dieser Tagung.
Ellen und Walter Pape
Open standards, especially open document formats, are essential tools for bridging digital divides and giving content creators control over their work. We would like to see governments, organisations and companies around the world switch to fully open and standardised file formats, freeing them from vendor lock-in and improving compatibility across multiple platforms and operating systems.
So, today we celebrate Document Freedom Day, an international day for spreading awareness about open standards and open document formats. You can help to spread the word by getting involved, using social media, and talking to public bodies about how the benefits of open standards. You can even help to prepare next year’s Document Freedom Day by organising events and giving presentations! See this page on the site for full details.
