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Starting today: the Month of LibreOffice, May 2021!

If you’ve been using LibreOffice for a while, you may be wondering: who makes it? Well, the answer is: people like you! LibreOffice is a worldwide, community open source project – and many people who help to improve it, actually started out as regular users of the software.

So in May, we want to encourage you to get involved, join our community, and have fun. You can build up valuable skills for a future career – and you don’t need to be a programmer. There are many ways to help make LibreOffice awesome, as we’ll see in a moment.

And best of all: everyone who contributes to LibreOffice in May 2021 can claim a cool sticker pack, and has the chance to win extra LibreOffice merchandise such as mugs, hoodies, T-shirts, rucksacks and more (we’ll choose 10 participants at random at the end):

How to take part

So, let’s get started! There are many ways you can help out – and as mentioned, you don’t need to be a developer. For instance, you can be a…

  • Handy Helper, answering questions from users on Ask LibreOffice. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim your shiny stickers.
  • First Responder, helping to confirm new bug reports: 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 7.1.2”.
  • Drum Beater, spreading the word: tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter or Mastodon! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim your stickers.
  • Globetrotter, translating the user 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.
  • Docs Doctor, writing documentation: Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

We’ll be updating this page every day with usernames across our various services, as people contribute. So dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker pack at the end as thanks from us! And who knows, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to win bonus merch as well…

Let’s go! We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Mastodon and Twitter accounts over the next four weeks – stay tuned!

Open Badges for French Math Guide translators!

Thanks to localisation volunteers around the world, LibreOffice’s documentation is available in many languages. Today, we want to say thanks to the French community of translators, who localised the guide for LibreOffice Math 7.0 – great work, everyone!

Each translator gets an Open Badge from The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice. These are special, custom images with embedded metadata, confirming the contributions.

So, if you got a badge, feel free to share it on your blog, social media, Git page and other places! And indeed use it as proof of your abilities, when joining another project or looking for work! You can verify your badge here.

The recipients:

  • Sango BARKER-GILES
  • Maëlle GONZALEZ
  • Ornella NGUENANG LOWE
  • Célian LIMOUSIN
  • Baptiste LECUYER

Enjoy, and thanks again! Stay tuned to this blog for more Open Badges in coming months…

Community Member Monday: Necdet Yücel

Today we’re talking to Necdet Yücel from the Turkish LibreOffice community, who has been mentoring students and helping them to get involved with LibreOffice…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I have been working as a lecturer at a university for more than 20 years. I teach programming and computer networks courses in the computer engineering department. My main area of interest is free software. My personal contribution to the free software world is mostly by making Turkish translations of free software – and I try to explain the free software world to my students, and guide them through it.

What are you doing in the LibreOffice project right now?

I’m one of the old translators of LibreOffice. I have translated hundreds of thousands of words, but I have no motivation to work on translations for a while.

Since 2015, the year Gülşah Köse become a LibreOffice developer, more than 15 of my students made contributions to LibreOffice. One of them is Mert Tümer’s, who is an active LibreOffice developer. Gülşah’s work was a major influence for LibreOffice developments in Turkey. I am very proud of my students, who started with her and continued until Gökçe Küler.

Do you have any tips/thoughts to share from bringing people into the community?

I think we have no choice but to direct students to free software in universities. Because it’s the only chance to to study how the programs work. Reading well-written code, changing it, compiling and redistributing it are the main requirements for being good developers. If we can explain them to students, they will become free software developers.

Is there anything else you plan to do in the project

The only thing I think I know well is mentoring students to free software. My short term plan is to continue translating and consulting students for free software.

Many thanks to Necdet for all his contributions! And to everyone reading this who uses LibreOffice and is interested in getting more involved: find out what you can do here. We’d love to have you on board, in our community!

LibreOffice flyers for schools and universities – Help us to hand them out!

Our New Generation project is encouraging new – and especially younger – people to join the LibreOffice community, improve the software, and gain valuable skills.

We’ve created a flyer that can be handed out in schools and universities, and here it is:

Now, we need your help to spread the word! If you study or work in a school or university, we can send you some flyers that you can give to interested people. We also have versions of the flyer in other languages, translated from the source file (Vegur font required) by our community:

Want some flyers?

We’re happy to send them to you – just send us an email with some details, such as the school/uni where you work or study, how many you want, and in which language. Then we’ll get them printed and posted to you.

Thanks for helping to spread the word! To learn more about LibreOffice New Generation and share your ideas, join our Telegram group.

Community Member Monday: Gökçe Kuler

Today we’re talking to Gökçe Kuler from our Turkish LibreOffice community…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m from Aydın, Turkey. Currently I’m studying in my final years at the Computer Engineering department of Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University. I’m interested in free software – and enjoy working with free software projects and learning new things aboutthemit. I met free software when I started university via my advisor Necdet Yücel.

I like playing the guitar and the kalimba. Also, I recently started painting with acrylic paints. I’m vegetarian, and actively participate in animal protection and gender equality projects.

You recently solved your first bug in LibreOffice. How did that go?

In our final years at the university, we work on a project together with an advisor. My advisor Necdet Yücel offered to work on LibreOffice as a graduation project, and then Gülşah Köse mentored me to get involved.

Firstly, I prepared my working environment – then we decided to work on an unit test instead of a bug. I completed it, and sent it to Gerrit. I was very happy when I got my first “merged” email. After that, we selected a new bug, about a dialog. I solved it too and wrote a blog post. It’s a really good feeling, to contribute to such a big free software project.

Recently, I’ve started working on a new bug in Impress and progressing with it. I will continue contributing to LibreOffice.

Do you have any tips for other people new LibreOffice contributors?

Instead of starting with a complex bug, I suggest starting with small things like a missing unit test, or they can even fix a typo. In this process, we get the opportunity to learn about LibreOffice development tools like Git, Gerrit, Jenkins etc…

In this way, the mechanisms in the project can be better understood, and self-confidence is gained to solve a bug. In addition, LibreOffice is a huge project and I think it is very important to read the project code in detail to understand what we work on.

Thanks to Gökçe for all her contributions to LibreOffice! Anyone with C++ knowledge can dive in and explore our codebase. There’s lots to learn, but we’re making it easier to get involved with Easy Hacks and channels for communication. Join us!

Writer Guide 7.1 is just out!

The LibreOffice documentation team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the Writer Guide 7.1

The book is a complete guide for users who want to explore the best resources of LibreOffice Writer, the word processor of the LibreOffice suite. Covering advanced topics such as styles, illustrations, indexes and table of contents, master documents, form design, document automation and more, this guide will bring your word processing skills to a professional level.

The Writer Guide 7.1 is a joint effort of Jean Weber and Kees Kriek, who reviewed and updated The LibreOffice 6.4 Writer Guide with the new features of LibreOffice 7.1, released last February.

“I enjoy writing user documentation for LibreOffice because it gives me an excuse to learn about new and improved features that I might otherwise not know about. The team members are good to work with, friendly and helpful. I especially want to thank Kees Kriek for reviewing all the chapters of this book.”

Jean Weber

Kees Kriek

The Writer Guide 7.1 is available for download at https://documentation.libreoffice.org and a printed copy at Lulu.com will soon be available.

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