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LibreOffice 24.2 Shines Again! Writer 24.2 and Calc 24.2 Guides Published

The LibreOffice Community Documentation Team is happy to announce the immediate release of the latest Writer and Calc guides for the new LibreOffice 24.2 office suite.

The two books are updates of the respective LibreOffice 7.6 guides, and describe the new features available in LibreOffice 24.2.

Jean Weber and Steve Fanning leaded the update of the Guides and provided valuable inputs to the contents.

The Writer Guide

Jean Weber

Updated and review by Jean Weber, the Writer Guide is the authoritative guide for using Writer to edit documents, from a single page to a full book. The latest Writer guide includes all these updates:

  • Comments can now use styles
  • New features in the Navigator
  • Save with password dialog now has a password strength meter
  • Insert Special Characters dropdown now shows a character description
  • Improved support for multi-page floating tables
  • “Legal” ordered list numbering: make a given list level use Arabic numbering for all its numeric portions
  • Miscellaneous changes in the names of some fields and buttons
  • And more; see the Release Notes

 

 

 

The Calc Guide

Steve Fanning
Steve Fanning

Updated by Steve Fanning, the guide contains description of the new features of Calc 24.2, the spreadsheet program of LibreOffice:

  • Live font preview when using the Font Name menus on the Properties deck of the Sidebar and on the Formatting toolbar.
  • Interactions to switch between sheets operate cyclically.
  • Option to view or hide column/row highlighting.
  • Additional metadata fields on the Description tab of the Properties dialog.
  • On Windows platforms, support for Alt+NumPad codes covering full Unicode range.
  • Text description of highlighted character on drop-down from Insert Special Characters toolbar icon.
  • Password strength meters on several dialogs.
  • Search field on Functions deck of Sidebar.
  • Support for FTP protocol removed from Hyperlink dialog.
  • Changes to auto-recovery and backup options.
  • Search function on Tools – Options dialogs.
  • Security warnings converted from dialogs to infobars.
  • Modify button renamed Assign on Customize dialog.
  • Language Settings menu of Tools – Options dialogs renamed to Languages and Locales.

More…

LibreOffice Community 24.2 also includes many other changes, including:

  • New password-based ODF encryption that hides metadata better and is more resistant to tampering
  • Clarification of macro security options to make it clear exactly what is allowed and what is not
  • Accessibility improvements
  • Improvements in interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats

The Guides are available in PDF, in source OpenDocument Format and printed versions from the bookshelf and documentation web pages.

TDF is Google Seasons of Doc Mentoring Organization

The Document Foundation has been accepted as organization for the Google Seasons of Docs, a project whose goals are to give technical writers an opportunity to gain experience in contributing to open source projects, and to give open source projects an opportunity to engage the technical writing community.

For technical writers who are new to open source, the program provides an opportunity to gain experience in contributing to open source projects. For technical writers who’re already working in open source, the program provides a potentially new way of working together.

During the program, technical writers will spend a few months working closely with the LibreOffice community, bringing their technical writing expertise to the project’s documentation, and at the same time learn about the open source project and new technologies. At the same time, LibreOffice documentation team members will work with the technical writers to improve the project’s documentation and processes.

LibreOffice is an advanced office suite covering may areas of knowledge, from maths and sciences, engineering, financials, editing, drawing, printing and more. LibreOffice is also that kind of application that is used cross-industry, a very rich opportunity for technical writing.

Olivier Hallot, LibreOffice documentation coordinator, will lead the GSoD project, supported by Sophie Gautier and by members of the LibreOffice documentation team such as Drew Jensen, who has immediately created a banner to visually support this community effort.

All information about the Google Summer of Docs project are on the GSoD website. An outline of the project’s different steps is available on the GSoD timeline. The next deadline in the process for The Document Foundation is May 28th, as we we have to find interested technical writers to discuss our ideas, which are summarized on the following TDF wiki page. The list includes some of our project’s permanent challenges, but should not be limited to these items.

LibreOffice contributors who are interested in becoming a mentor for the GSoD project should get in touch with Olivier Hallot by sending him a message or by subscribing to the documentation mailing list.

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