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LibreOffice: A great choice for schools and education

2020-03-242020-03-25

Many schools, colleges and universities around the world use LibreOffice to get their work done every day. The free and open source office suite, compatible with Microsoft Office and a successor to OpenOffice(.org) with many extra features, includes a complete set of powerful tools for students and teachers:

Writer – word processor
Calc – spreadsheet
Impress – presentation tool
Draw – for technical drawings, brochures etc.
Math – formula editor
Base – database

Benefits in education

Because LibreOffice is free and open source software, students and teachers can download and install it on as many machines as they like, without worrying about license fees, subscriptions or audits. If you’re a teacher, you can be sure that your students won’t suddenly be locked out of their documents for not renewing a subscription. They can keep working, as long as they like!

As well as the desktop app, there’s also LibreOffice Online, a cloud-based version of the suite that students can access via their web browsers. You can set up LibreOffice Online on your own infrastructure, with help from professional support services.

Additionally, LibreOffice is backed up by a rich ecosystem, with many companies and resources available to help users:

Tutorials for teachers

Global and local mailing lists

One more benefit, especially for IT students and teachers: because LibreOffice is open source, anyone can study how it works and make improvements. See what you can do for LibreOffice here!

Give it a try – download LibreOffice for Windows, macOS and Linux

LibreOffice 6.4.2 available for download

2020-03-19

Berlin, March 19, 2020 – The Document Foundation announces the availability of LibreOffice 6.4.2, the 2nd minor release of the LibreOffice 6.4 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users. LibreOffice 6.4.2 includes several bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.

Mac users will be happy to know that the issue of blurry fonts on Retina displays has been resolved.

LibreOffice 6.4.2 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is not optimized for enterprise class deployments, where features are less important than robustness. Users wanting a more mature version can download LibreOffice 6.3.5, which includes some months of back-ported fixes.

LibreOffice 6.4.2’s change log pages are available on TDF’s wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.4.2/RC1 (changed in RC1) and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Releases/6.4.2/RC2 (changed in RC2).

LibreOffice’s individual users are helped by a global community of volunteers: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.

LibreOffice in business

For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommend sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and other benefits, including Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Also, the work done by ecosystem partners flows back into the LibreOffice project, benefiting everyone.

Also, support for migrations and trainings should be sourced from certified professionals who provide value-added services which extend the reach of the community to the corporate world and offer CIOs and IT managers a solution in line with proprietary offerings.

In fact, LibreOffice – thanks to its mature codebase, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and long-term support options from certified partners – represents the ideal solution for businesses that want to regain control of their data and free themselves from vendor lock-in.

Availability of LibreOffice 6.4.2

LibreOffice 6.4.2 is immediately available from the following link: https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Minimum requirements are specified on the download page. TDF builds of the latest LibreOffice Online source code are available as Docker images: https://hub.docker.com/r/libreoffice/online/.

LibreOffice Online is fundamentally a server-based platform, and should be installed and configured by adding cloud storage and an SSL certificate. It might be considered an enabling technology for the cloud services offered by ISPs or the private cloud of enterprises and large organizations.

All versions of LibreOffice are built with document conversion libraries from the Document Liberation Project: https://www.documentliberation.org.

Support LibreOffice

LibreOffice users are invited to join the community at https://ask.libreoffice.org, where they can get and provide user-to-user support. People willing to contribute their time and professional skills to the project can visit the dedicated website at https://whatcanidoforlibreoffice.org.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can provide financial support to The Document Foundation with a donation via PayPal, credit card or other tools at https://www.libreoffice.org/donate.

Community Member Monday: Tomoyuki Kubota

2020-03-162020-03-16

Today we’re talking to Tomoyuki Kubota (aka himajin100000), who is active in the Japanese LibreOffice community and recently became a member of TDF…

To start with, tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in Tsurumi Ward, Yokohama City, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. Though it’s not as advanced as central Tokyo, Yokohama is one of the major cities near Tokyo, so it’s relatively easy to reach big stores.

One of my hobbies is, of course, reading the source code of LibreOffice via OpenGrok (for symbol-based searches) or via GitHub (sometimes, for text based search), to try to find out the cause of trouble I sometimes see on someone’s tweets when I search for the term “LibreOffice” on Twitter.

Sometimes I watch videos on www.nicovideo.jp, mainly Voiceroid and CEVIO commedy drama series made by others, and videos on the games I played in my childhood with Super Nintendo, such as Romancing SaGa 2, Kirby’s Dream Course (known as Kirby Bowl in Japan) etc. Sometimes, I enjoy watching videos on Human Resource Machine played by newbies’ to computer programming!

Why did you decide to become a member of TDF?

I was invited by Ilmari Lauhakangas, who is in charge of Development Marketing at TDF.

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

Honestly speaking, my main focus varies drastically, frequently at a whim, sometimes driven bya bug’s difficulties. I was planning to work on this bug and also this one, but what I did in the end was research on:

Ask LibreOffice questions (and this one (copying the content in just one whole cell entails a new line character as the row separator, isn’t this behaviour inconvenient?)
this tweet (in what rule, bar graph axis starts with a number other than zero?)
Behaviour of ‘Date Acceptance Patterns’
‘Python Macros’ dialog has a ‘Create’ button, but it’s grayed out. (Possibly caused by ‘Creatable’ flags not set? BeanShell and JavaScript relies on the same script providers made in Java.)

Still not tackled enough: this tweet (printing company said they can’t guarantee the output if fonts are embedded in PDF with their encoding being ‘built-in’. Workaround is to use Microsoft Print To PDF, which sets identity-H, but the pseudo-driver does not have a UI for changing page size!)

After doing research on other matters to a certain degree, I want to return to my initial purpose – the bugs I mentioned at the start of this answer.

What does LibreOffice really need?

After meeting with Naruhiko Ogasawara, Shinji Enoki and Jun Nagota of the Japanese LibreOffice community, I noticed that event attendees are often developers, or who already know about LibreOffice to a certain degree, so not very successful in welcoming new end users.

Aside from that, IMHO, people new to LibreOffice are often even newbies to computer science itself, and don’t have concrete ideas on what application software is, how files are managed,
etc, and for those people, I think, before giving inpus on LibreOffice, helping them to get that knowledge first would be easier for them to start using LibreOffice.

Thanks to Tomoyuki for all his help! Stay tune to the blog for more community member interviews…

LibreOffice at InstallFest 2020, Prague, 29 February – 1 March

2020-03-112020-03-12

Our Czech LibreOffice community attends events around the country, spreading the word about LibreOffice, free software and open standards. Today, Petr Valach reports back from InstallFest, which took place on 29 February and 1 March. InstallFest focuses on GNU/Linux, helping new users to install the operating system, but also has lectures and stands for many other free and open source software projects…

For the first time this year, the LibreOffice community attended the InstallFest conference. The following is a summary of the knowledge and insights we gained there…

The vast majority of visitors were from younger generations – often high school or even elementary school pupils. The new mobile application from Collabora, released just a few days before – and surprisingly, almost no one knew about it – aroused great interest. Collabora Office Mobile has proven to be a highly featureful and functional alternative for the desktop version – although it has a limited range of features, but its capabilities are surprising.

One of the questions was about handling ODF files with embedded fonts. Experiments have shown that if the file contains text written in non-traditional fonts, and these are inserted into the file, it will display correctly in the mobile application. The only problem is with the file size, because LibreOffice does not allow you to embed font subsets – it embeds whole fonts. On the other hand, it ensures full compatibility when editing a file on another device; all characters defined in the font are inserted in the file.

LibreOffice Online has also gained great interest. It enables collaboration within a corporation, which can have thousands and tens of thousands of users (and it works, as we know from foreign deployments). There is a certain obstacle to the need to install the application as a cloud service – the method of installation is not widely known (solved by the documentation team, as the LibreOffice Online manual is published, and the Czech documentation team completes its Czech version).

Some users complained about several problems, for instance: scrolling doesn’t work on the touch screen, instead of text. It is a bug inherited from OpenOffice.org, not solved under number 85677.

One requirement also involved inserting the name of any worksheet in the Calc list into the selected cell, and dynamically linking it to the worksheet, to change the content of that cell when the worksheet name changes. Currently, only the name of the current worksheet can be inserted into the cell, either by field or by function:

= MID (CELL ("filename"); FIND ("# $"; CELL ("filename")) + 2; LEN (CELL ("filename")))

Now it is not possible to insert the name of any sheet in the list – it is not solved in bug 94975. (This is not possible in Microsoft Excel, by the way.)

Defender Folder Access Control in Windows 10 blocks LibreOffice installation. You must disable this feature before installing LibreOffice. For more information, see the LibreOffice wiki page.

We also learned from other visitors at the event about other schools and companies that use LibreOffice. We will address them shortly.

A big thanks to Petr and the whole Czech community for their work! And to anyone reading this who’d like to attend local events and help to spread the word about LibreOffice, join our marketing mailing list and drop us a line. We’ll point you in the right direction!

Announcing Open Badges for LibreOffice contributors!

2020-03-10

LibreOffice is made by volunteers and certified developers across the globe, and today we’re announcing a new system to credit their work and show appreciation: Open Badges. So what are they?

In a nutshell, Open Badges are PNG images that are awarded to contributors for reaching a certain threshold – such as a number of commits to the codebase, or answering questions on Ask LibreOffice. But these images are something special: they contain metadata describing the contributor’s work, which can be verified using an external service. Open Badges are used by other free software projects, such as Fedora.

We at The Document Foundation – the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice – will start issuing customised badges to contributors, who can then proudly display them on websites or social media. And because of the embedded metadata, contributors can use the badges as proof of their work. If you’ve been a long-time contributor to LibreOffice and are in the job market, use your badge to highlight your involvement in a large open source project!

Starting off: Ask LibreOffice contributors

The first set of badges go to the nine people on Ask LibreOffice, our community assistance website, who’ve posted over 100 answers. We’ll be in touch personally with the badges! Their usernames:

Ratslinger
ajlittoz
Mike Kaganski
Opaque
Lupp
erAck
RGB-es
ebot
JohnSUN

Stay tuned to this blog for more Open Badges awards!

LibreOffice power feature: join text boxes after importing PDFs

2020-03-062020-03-06

Although PDF is primarily used as a read-only format, there are tools for editing PDFs – and indeed, many people pay quite a bit of money for these tools, such as Adobe Acrobat Pro.

But there are alternatives! LibreOffice Draw provides a powerful PDF editor, for free, and since LibreOffice 6.4 it has a great feature to speed up editing: the ability to consolidate (join) multiple text boxes. This is especially useful if you’ve imported a PDF, and the text content is spread across multiple text boxes, making it hard to work with.

Let’s see it in action. Imagine you’ve opened a PDF document in LibreOffice Draw, and there are lots of separate text boxes, like this:

This is fiddly to work with – wouldn’t it be great if you could join all of these text boxes together, to edit them as a single chunk of text? Well, in LibreOffice 6.4, you can. Just select all of the text boxes, using the shift key while selecting them, then right-click and choose Consolidate Text in the context menu: