March 8, International Women’s Day

If we must celebrate a day for women, let us celebrate freedom from stereotypes, from expectations, from idolisation, from sacrifice…

Stop congratulating women for being the secret behind a successful man… Start saluting them for being successful.

Stop saying the mother is sacred for all the sacrifices she makes… Try to reduce those sacrifices!

Stop telling women they are beautiful… Try telling them it’s not important to be beautiful!

Stop praising her roles as mother, wife, daughter, sister… Celebrate her as an individual, a person, independent of relationships.

Stop justifying her necessity to multi task… Give her a chance not to!

Stop these constructs which are aimed at making her strive for an impossible balance… Let her be inadequate… And happy!

Stop making her look at herself through a conveniently male viewpoint.

Let her be imperfect, whimsical, irresponsible, boorish, lazy, fierce, opinionated, loud, flabby, ungroomed, adventurous, unpredictable, unprepared, impractical…

LET HER BE

(attribution of these words seem to be impossible, but happy to update it with the original author)

LibreOffice Calc Guide 6.2 is now available

Berlin, January 27th, 2020 – The LibreOffice Documentation Team is happy to announce the Calc Guide 6.2, a long-awaited update of the old Calc Guide 4.4, to cover all of the innovations included in newer versions of the suite. The team wanted to catch-up with the forthcoming release of LibreOffice 6.4, while offering to the user community a book with its contents suitable for the most-used features of the LibreOffice 6 family.

Several team members contributed to the effort, notably Steve Fanning, Jean Weber, Kees Kriek, Cathy Crumbley, Zach Parlimann, Dave Barton and Drew Jensen.

Joining the LibreOffice Documentation Team was an opportunity for me to continue to be technically active after my recent retirement and, with my mathematical background, the Calc Guide was a great book for me to start with“, said Steve Fanning, volunteer technical writer. “I enjoyed contributing to the update of this guide, finding the task both interesting and challenging. In fact, one of the topics caught my imagination to such an extent that I proposed, and am now implementing, a new wiki-based online reference guide for the extensive set of spreadsheet functions provided by Calc“, he added.

Steve Fanning

The LibreOffice suite – and the Calc spreadsheet module in particular – is a complex application with many uses in the modern world. Calc is widely used in all kinds of businesses, and contains advanced calculation and mathematical features that demand quality and broad documentation. The team strived to provide the best content, from simple arithmetic calculations to complex features such as statistics, enhanced pivot tables, data crunching techniques and many more.

The Dutch community is actively translating the LibreOffice Guides to improve the reach of LibreOffice in the Netherlands. “The Calc Guide is an important piece of documentation that is always in great demand from our users. I devoted time and energy to review many chapters and get the guide ready quickly, so it was also possible to start the translation to Dutch sooner, and have the Dutch users benefit of the new Calc guide too“, said Kees Kriek, volunteer reviewer and translator for the Dutch community.

Kees Kriek of the Dutch Community

The LibreOffice 6.2 Calc Guide is available for immediate download from the link https://documentation.libreoffice.org/en/english-documentation/. Source files are available from the link https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/bbawfrEfMz4zDyw

Winner Announced for 2020 Conference Logo Competition

In 2020, openSUSE and LibreOffice will have a shared conference from October 13 – 16 in Nuremberg, Germany. We’re pleased to announce that the the winner of the openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference logo competition is Kukuh Syafaat from Indonesia.

Kukuh’s “Fresh Community Spirit” was the winning design and was one of 10 designs submitted during the competition. A “Mystery Box” will be sent to Kukuh for the winning design!

The organizing committee for this year’s joint conference selected the winning design during a meeting on Jan. 20. The logo portrayed an ideal fit for the conference since openSUSE and LibreOffice are combining their community conferences for just one year in 2020 to celebrate LibreOffice’s 10-year anniversary and the openSUSE Project’s 15-year anniversary.

Now that the logo has been announced, fliers and posters can be created to help advertise the event. The conference website will soon be available at on the openSUSE and LibreOffice websites, and the Call for Papers will begin next month. We look forward to seeing you there!

The Documentation Team announces the Math Guide 6.4

Berlin, January 22nd, 2020 – With the upcoming release of LibreOffice 6.4, the Documentation Team is proud to announce the Math Guide 6.4, an update of the previous Math 4.0 guide, updated to cover all innovations included in LibreOffice 6.4. The guide was updated by Roman Kuznetsov and revised by Dave Barton from the documentation community.

Math Guide

“I updated the Math Guide to give everyone up-to-date information about using that interesting and (often forgotten) tool in LibreOffice”, said Roman Kuznetsov, community member and volunteer technical writer. “I did it to improve my skills in writing of documentation. Also I want say thank you to the LibreOffice Documentation Team for its help with that task.”

Roman Kuznetsov

The guide is available for immediate download from The Document Foundation cloud instance and is published in PDF format, as along in its source file in ODF format.

About the LibreOffice Documentation Team

The LibreOffice Documentation Team is devoted to producing the best documentation for the LibreOffice end user, and is actively pursuing the goal of keeping the LibreOffice literature updated, effective and accurate. Come and join us!.

Happy New Year 2020

2020 is going to be a milestone year for the LibreOffice community, as we are going to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the LibreOffice project on September 28 – the date of the official announcement, with a press release distributed to FOSS media – and the 20th anniversary of the free office suite on July 19 – the date of the announcement issued by Sun for the release of StarOffice source code to the open source community.

It will be a year long celebration. To start it in the right way, four images which can be reused by LibreOffice community members to share their commitment to FOSS and to the best free office suite ever (background images are from Pixabay, and can be used without attribution). By right clicking on the images, it will be possible to download a larger version (2500 pixel wide).

Happy New Year 2020 to all LibreOffice community members and users worldwide.