Category: Technology

LibreOffice is the best free office suite ever, and is available thanks to the combined effort of a large global community, which is also providing professional and volunteer support to LibreOffice users.

LibreOffice enterprise users can obtain professional support services from certified developers (Level 3 Support for feature development or bug/regression fixes), certified migration professionals (project management for migrations or large deployments), and certified trainers (basic, intermediate or advanced trainings).

LibreOffice individual users can get volunteer support from community members, through different channels: the most popular are mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website.

LibreOffice Calc allows to show quite easily the top 10 values in a spreadsheet column with the AutoFilter function, which is activated with the menu Data > Filter > AutoFilter (image on the left). Once active, the function shows a down arrow in the first cell of each column, which opens a drop down menu with different options (image on the right). The third option from the top, after Sort Ascending and Sort Descending, is Top 10 (values).

 LibreOffice allows to select the language to check the spelling of a document – or a paragraph – by clicking on the language area of the status bar. The action opens a menu with different options: first, the available dictionaries for the document, and then other choices from disabling the spell checker to choosing a language for a paragraph.

LibreOffice allows to save different versions of the same document in the ODF file. The feature can be accessed with the menu File > Versions…, which opens the dialog windows on the left.

The different options on this dialog window allow to save a new version of the document, or to force the software to always save a new version on closing the document.

Once the different versions are saved, they are listed in the box of Existing Versions. The user can select each version, and perform several operations: open, show or delete each single version, or compare two versions.

 LibreOffice can be configured according to user needs with the menu Tools > Options, which opens a context sensible dialog window with a menu on the left and many corresponding option pages on the right.

One of the least known options pages is the Paths one, where the user can modify (or add to) the default directories used by LibreOffice to store – among the others – Images, Documents and Templates.

The screenshot represents my own configuration, where I edit the three highlighted paths according to my working habits: I store all documents and images in two different folders, and I have a separate folder for templates.

By tweaking the configuration, when I access templates, import an image or open/save a document, the dialog window will always point to the right folder inetad of the default one.

Of course, this is especially handy for large deployments, as LibreOffice can be configured to access a shared storage area instead of the local folder.

 To change the number of a page – for instance, if you add a new document to a series which has to be compiled into a single book at the end of the year – you must put the cursor somewhere in the first paragraph of the page and access the menu Format > Paragraph. Inside the multi tab dialog window, you have to open the Text Flow tab (shown in the image on the left), and in the Break section check the Insert box – with Type “Page” and Position “Before” – and the With Page Style box, using Default Style. Then, you enter the Page Number in the box on the right and confirm by hitting the OK button. You will immediately see the new page number in the footer.