Category: Meetings

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!

Yes, LibreOffice is at FOSDEM in Brussels – come to our stand (H.A1) and chat with our community – and also grab cool swag! (T-shirts, stickers, candy and more…)

LibreOffice community members attend many events around the world to spread the word about the software, encourage people to get involved, and have fun! We’re really grateful for all their efforts. On November 2 and 3, the OpenFest 2019 took place in Sofia, Bulgaria, and Gabriele Ponzo was there. Here’s his report:

What was the event about?

Sofia’s OpenFest looks like probably the largest open source software and hardware festival in Bulgaria. There were plenty of people – more on Saturday than on Sunday.

There were three tracks, and a huge room for many workshops (four or five usually), which covered topics such as electronics skills improvement (eg soldering), or padlock cracking, or developing with Elasticsearch…

There was also an awesome kindergarten (with backlit sand projection game), a relaxation area and a speaker’s corner, to allow attendees pose more questions to speakers, after their lectures. The organisation of the event was great, I must say, which includes pre and post parties, lead by Yana Petrova.

Why did you go there?

The goal of my mission was to create a local LibreOffice community, and possibly increase the membership base of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind the software, having this country better represented. I’ve seen many people that were interested – so we’ll see if they will become active in our community.

I also had a great opportunity to get in touch with a local technical school called TUES, which is a high school but really well connected with the university. We have now started an official dialogue, in order to try organising some kind of lecture or workshop there too.

My dream would be to have teachers giving students practice with our Easy Hacks and thus giving them the chance to get their hands on a real project’s source code, and possibly improve it. This would have a great added value, from my point of view, in IT lessons, giving the students satisfaction and many real chances for the future.

What did you do there?

I had the opportunity to share a booth with the wonderful guys from the openSUSE community. They were really kind and warm with me and helped in many ways, from coming to the airport to pick me, to talking about LibreOffice in Bulgarian to attendees of the booth, side-by-side with me who was doing in English.

A special thank you goes to Dimitar Zahariev who was so gentle and I’m really happy and honoured to have become friend of, as well as to Rozalina, Rositsa and Rumen.

At the end of the morning of the second day, I had my usual talk about our community and TDF membership. The hall wasn’t full, as in some other’s lectures, but I received a lot of questions at the end, which gave me a lot of hope, and I also talked to two interesting speakers during lunch, about LibreOffice and its ecosystem.

Are there any other events you’d like to attend?

I’ve been told by Yana that they’ll probably have another event during next summer. Either that one and/or the next edition of this one; I’d like to come, but this time with someone else from our community, in order to have our own booth, with plenty of gadgets and marketing materials.

This time, in fact, we couldn’t send anything there and Dimitar was so kind to print flyers for us. Then the organisation team have let us share a big LCD screen with the Kiwi TCMS guys, to show some videos. A thank you goes also to those last ones (Alex, Anton and Vasilena), who were so kind and generous to let use the screen one day per each booth. I’ve been talking to them too, in order to see if the two projects may collaborate.

The event really deserves our presence, from my point of view, since there was a lot of people attending, and the organisation was really professional, starting with the conference management software developed by them – we should ask them if we could try it for our conferences 😉 And also with the audio and video service (like at FOSDEM!).

How can community members get involved and help out at other events?

When we have a booth, especially if it’s not shared, more people are necessary, to cover whole days. This gives everyone the chance to do other things – to have the possibility to follow some talks, do some PR, and get some rest now and then. But the best would be to have people who’re not shy, possibly used to speaking in public, and used to approaching unknown people – in order to interact with them and explain our project.

Another way to involve attendees is to have some kind of game or challenge, giving some gadget as a prize. This is something I’ve seen at most of the booths at this conference.

In conclusion, I really enjoyed this event and I hope to come back and increase even more our presence and our brand knowledge, hoping to find always more contributors to our projects, who could also be the numerous IT companies present in Bulgaria.

Stanislav Horáček writes:

Like every year, we would like to say few words about our impressions and experiences from our Czech free and open source software (FOSS) conferences in autumn. As in the last year, we participate with our LibreOffice booth at LinuxDays in Prague (me and Zdeněk Crhonek), and at OpenAlt in Brno (Petr Valach and Zdeněk Crhonek).

We appreciated supporting words from LibreOffice users, as well as their questions and critical remarks – it was good opportunity to realise that LibreOffice is a really complex piece of software, and some ways of using it can be unpredictable 🙂 Some notes from the events:

• LibreOffice Online is better known than at previous events, but still some people are surprised that there is this version, so there is interest in how to install it and get it working. We noticed a demand for an online service with LibreOffice as paid alternative to Google Docs for small companies.

• Other quite hot topics were macros and (missing) automatic updates in Windows.

• Examples of special questions: using a stylus and handwriting recognition in LibreOffice; a version for the Librem device; embedding LibreOffice in another application; creating business cards with pictures; saving values of Solver settings in Calc; filtering by colours in Calc…

• At LinuxDays, I had a talk about a new Czech spellcheck dictionary (which also uses Wikidata as a source), available as a LibreOffice extension.

Thanks to organizers of both events for this opportunity and to The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, for the support! We can really recommend these types of events, as you get feedback from both end users of our software, and developers/enthusiasts of another communities. Don’t hesitate to attend if there is a similar event in your country 🙂

TDF says: huge thanks to Stanislav, Zdeněk and Petr for all their great work! Native language communities are essential building blocks of the LibreOffice project, helping to share knowledge, spread the word and make LibreOffice even better for everyone. And everyone is welcome to join and help out!