Tips & Tricks Archive

Parabolas as custom shapes in LibreOffice

Regina Henschel writes…

Teachers of mathematics often need a parabola in their instructions or exercises. Creating a parabola by using a chart is cumbersome. Therefore I have generated some parabolas as custom shape for anyone to use. You can get them in this LibreOffice Writer document.

A simple parabola

A parabola

3D Objects: Making a Globe with LibreOffice

Regina Henschel shows you how to do some nifty 3D tricks in LibreOffice…

First, you need a world map in “Miller projection”. You find a suitable one on Wikipedia – download the full-size version. Here’s a thumbnail of it (CC-BY-SA, Daniel R. Strebe, August 2011):

Next, start LibreOffice Draw, and create

OpenOffice crashing on macOS Big Sur? Try LibreOffice

Some Apache OpenOffice users are reporting that version 4.1.8 is crashing on Apple macOS 11.0 (aka “Big Sur” or 10.16) when opening OOXML documents – like .docx and .xlsx. The error message is:

OpenOffice quit unexpectedly

Here’s a video showing how it crashes (WebM version here):

What to do with a document “created by a newer version of OpenOffice”

Are you using Apache OpenOffice? Have you recently tried to open a .odt, .ods or .odp file and received this error message? “This document was created by a newer version of OpenOffice. It may contain features not supported by your current version.

In this case, the document probably wasn’t created in OpenOffice,

New Beginner LibreOffice Tutorials and Videos from Paul Sutton

LibreOffice’s documentation community creates handbooks, guides, tutorials and other resources to help users get the most out of the software. Everyone is welcome to join the team and help out – it’s a great way to build up experience for a possible career in technical writing!

Paul Sutton is producing

LibreOffice Tips & Tricks: Replacing Microsoft Fonts

Fonts are one of the main culprits of LibreOffice interoperability problems with Microsoft Office documents, when viewed from the end user’s point of view. In fact, Microsoft Office document are often using one of the default fonts – either the old “Core Fonts for the Web” (deprecated in 2002, but still