Category: Meetings

Daniel Armando Rodriguez writes:

On Saturday August 22, in the Ibero-American afternoon/evening, the Hispanic Community met for the fourth consecutive month with panelists who covered several topics related to the office suite par-excellence in the FLOSS world.

The event was broadcast live on YouTube and Facebook. The activity began at 16:00 UTC, extended for almost 4 hours and presented speakers of 6 nationalities recognized for their participation and collaboration in the project. All the talks are available on the LibreOffice Hispano channel.

• Ismael Fanlo, from Spain, presented the work with sections in Writer.
• Celia Palacios and Jazmín Hurtado, from Mexico, talked to us about social service at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México and LibreOffice.
• Daniel Rodriguez, from Argentina, spoke about the use of alternative fonts.
• Xiomara Céspedes, from Costa Rica, gave a presentation on Mail Merge.
• Ameck Bozo, from Venezuela, showed how to work with Linear Regressions in Calc.
• Emiliano Gonzalez, from Spain, spoke about Base: Forms / Reports, HSQLDB / Firebird.
• Klaibson Ribeiro, from Brazil, gave a talk on the Integration of Zotero with Writer.
• Andrea Navarro, from Argentina, presented the creation and management of thesis and final works with LibreOffice.

This was, of course, an open event – free and aimed at anyone who is interested in knowing a little more about LibreOffice. Also, we thank our friend Servio Paladines from the Latin Community of Free Technologies, who managed the live broadcast.

Everyone loves to meet in person, share ideas, work on the software and have a good time. Of course, “real life” meetings have been difficult in the last few months, so many communities in the LibreOffice project have chosen to go online. Daniel A. Rodriguez gives us an update:

Yesterday, the Hispanic community of LibreOffice celebrated the second of a series of online events that was broadcast live on YouTube. The activity started at 17:00 UTC and lasted about 3 and a half hours. The virtual assistants benefited from the presence of several members recognized for their participation and collaboration in the project:

• Xiomara Céspedes, from Costa Rica, provided an overview of the use of styles.

• Carlos Parra Saldivar from Cuba spoke about the Migration Protocol.

• Adolfo Jaime Barrientos, from Mexico, about the translation and localisation work of LibreOffice.

• Ismael Fanlo, from Spain, presented conditional formatting.

• Francisco Ruedas and Antonio Caba, also from Spain, presented the work of office tool migration in the Junta de Andalucía.

• Roberto Guidek, from Argentina, informed us about the use of a Calc solver for linear programming in the Faculty of Economics of the National University of Misiones.

• While I, Daniel A. Rodriguez, gave a tour of the possibilities of collaboration presented by the project.

This was, of course, an open event – free of charge and aimed at anyone interested in the FOSS office suite par excellence. Also, we thank our friend Servio from the Latin Community of Free Technologies, who managed the live transmission through YouTube.

LibreOffice communities around the world love to meet in person, share ideas, work on the software, and have a good time. Of course, “real life” meetings have been difficult in recent months, so communities are going online instead. Daniel A. Rodriguez, LibreOffice contributor based in Argentina and TDF Board member, tells us about an online meetup at the weekend:

On Saturday, the Hispanic LibreOffice community held an online event via TDF’s Jitsi instance, and streamed on YouTube. The event started 17:00 UTC and last almost 4 hours. More that 35 people took part, which benefited from the presence of several members who are well-recognised for their participation and collaboration in the project:

• Celia Palacios, from Mexico, told us about the work of the documentation team.

• Mauricio Baeza, also from the Aztec land, talked about the potential of macros using Python.

• Xisco Fauli, from Spain, explained how quality control is applied to software in the development stages.

• Ismael Fanlo, another Spaniard, presented pivot tables.

• Gustavo Pacheco, from Brazil, talked about becoming a member and invited everyone to apply.

Meanwhile, I gave a tour of the collaboration possibilities presented by the project. This was, of course, an open event – free and aimed at anyone interested in the FOSS office suite per excellence. The event took place on Saturday May 16th on our Jitsi server. Also, thanks to our friend Servio from the open-source Latin community, we had a live broadcast through YouTube, now available as recording.

Thanks to everyone who took part! LibreOffice benefits enormously from the work of communities around the globe. If you’re reading this and want to boost LibreOffice in your country or language, check out our native-language projects and give us a hand!

Communities around the world help to translate and localise LibreOffice in over 100 languages. We really appreciate their efforts! Even when they can’t meet in person, they hold online events to make progress, as Ahmad Haris reports:

March 28, 2020: The Indonesian LibreOffice community held an online translation marathon, which focused on the user interface. Normally, we have in-person meetings for such translating marathons, but due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation, we held it online. We use Jitsi and deploy to our community server. The results were quite positive, since we’re heading towards reaching 100% translation. Only a few strings (21) remain untranslated because we also use the same string in the Indonesian language.

A big thanks to everyone in the Indonesian LibreOffice community who took part! Everyone around the world is welcome to join our translation projects and make LibreOffice accessible for all, regardless of language or location. It’s a great way to use your skills, contribute to a well-known FOSS project, and have fun!

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!