We’ve just wrapped up the first day of the LibreOffice Conference 2022. You can check out the video streams from room 1 and room 2 – and after the conference, we’ll edit and upload individual videos of the talks.
Check out the schedule for day 2, and see you then, in-person or online! 👍
More news from the LibreOffice subreddit! User goose_pirate posted about an extension:
Hi everyone, I made this little extension for LibreOffice Calc which adds a few functions, currently FILTER, SORT, and XLOOKUP. I hope others will find this as useful as I do.
XLOOKUP is a function for finding things in a table by range or row. We asked goose_pirate for a bit of background on the extension:
I’ve been using both Excel and LibreOffice for many years and found the new(er) Excel functions like XLOOKUP to be really nice compared to the old VLOOKUP or INDEX MATCH. I wanted to use it in LibreOffice too, so I wrote this extension.
How I made it: I researched information about LibreOffice extensions, dissected a few such extensions made by others, and finally started my own. It wasn’t too bad, I was surprised no one has made something similar yet.
Great work, goose! 😊
LibreOffice’s presentation tool, Impress, includes a bunch of features for home and office use. But one thing that’s missing is recording and playback for audio comments in presentations.
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This feature is important in eLearning: in contrast to video recordings, audio recordings are stored per slide, and can be adjusted to match the individual pace of the presentation. This is particularly suitable in school, academic as well as corporate environments to make learning content and product presentations more interactive.
So, how can we get this feature in LibreOffice? Well, the CH Open association, which has been promoting open systems and standards in the Swiss ICT landscape for over 40 years, is organising a crowdfunding campaign to implement the feature. The project is estimated to cost €62,000 in total – with various milestones along the way.
On the LibreOffice subreddit, we became aware of some useful tutorial videos created by Steven Davids. These cover various components of the suite, and show how to achieve common tasks.
We asked Steven about how he chooses the topics for his videos, and how he makes them:
My video tutorials come to me – I do not go and look for them. If I have a problem, I search for a solution on the web. I always assume I am not unique, and that many other people had or have the same problem. If I do not find a solution or one that is readily available, I struggle my way out to a solution. Then I share that solution via video! Why video? Because it seems to me people are lazy to read and video illustrations are just easier to understand.
The videos are very low budget and homemade. There are no costs for the software since I use free public open-source programs for the screen recorder and video editor. There are many such programs, but OBS Studio and Shotcut serves me very well. I often use LibreOffice Presentation to assist in presenting the material. The hardware is also low cost. I already have a laptop and mobile phone so there are not extra costs there. A mid-range microphone from Samson is indispensable and basically the only additional cost.
Berlin, September 19, 2022 – The Document Foundation (TDF) announces the release of LibreOffice on Apple’s Mac App Store, to support end users who want to get all of their desktop software from Apple’s proprietary sales channel. So far, LibreOffice on the Mac App Store was released by Collabora. TDF will charge a convenience fee of €8.99, which will be invested to support development of the LibreOffice project.
TDF releasing on the Mac App Store is an evolution over the previous situation, which reflects the project’s new marketing strategy: The Document Foundation is focused on the release of the Community version, while ecosystem companies are focused on a value-added long-term supported versions targeted at enterprises. The distinction has the objective of educating organizations to support the FOSS project by choosing the LibreOffice version which has been optimized for deployments in production and is backed by professional services, and not the Community version generously supported by volunteers.
“We are grateful to Collabora for having supported LibreOffice on Apple’s Mac App Stores for quite a long time”, said Italo Vignoli, LibreOffice Marketing. The objective is to fulfill the needs of individual and enterprise users in a better way, although we know that the positive effects of the change will not be visible for some time. Educating enterprises about FOSS is not a trivial task and we have just started our journey in this direction”.
The Document Foundation will continue to provide LibreOffice for macOS for free from the LibreOffice website, which is the recommended source for all users.
LibreOffice packaged for the Mac App Store is based on the same source code, but does not include Java – because external dependencies are not allowed on the store – and therefore limits the functionalities of LibreOffice Base. The software is also supported by volunteers who donate their time to help users.
Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/libreoffice/id1630474372
