TDF Community Blog

Solver Tool has the capability to solve linear (and often nonlinear) programming problems, and is available in Microsoft Excel as well as LibreOffice.

edX, an online learning destination and MOOC provider founded by Harvard University and MIT in 2012 and offering high-quality courses from the world’s best universities and institutions to learners everywhere, has developed a tutorial which shows the user how to (1) load the solver into the spreadsheet, (2) define the problem and write out formulas for the objective and constraints, and (3) solve the problem.

edX tutorial is focused on Microsoft Excel (Mac and PC) and LibreOffice. At the end of the document there is a quick guide on how to debug the Solver.

Dana Lee Ling is a Professor at the College of Micronesia, who – amongst other academic tasks – is teaching students to use LibreOffice Calc to make statistical calculations. To support his lessons, he has published a manual – “Introduction to Statistics Using LibreOffice Calc, AOO Calc and Gnumeric” – based on the following contents: Populations and samples, Measures of middle and spread, Visualizing data, Paired data and scatter diagrams, Probability, Probability distributions, Introduction to the normal distribution, Normal distribution and z-values, Confidence intervals for the mean, Hypothesis testing against a known population mean, and Hypothesis testing two sample means.

Andrew Pitonyak has been the great master of StarBasic since forever. I still remember copies of his book being distributed at the 2nd OpenOffice Conference in Berlin, in September 2004, the very first time I was exposed to the global OOo community (and I decided to embark on the journey that has led to the birth of LibreOffice and The Document Foundation).

Andrew Pitonyak’s OOo Macro Information website is full of useful information. The most useful resource is the 3rd edition of his book – OOo Macros Explained (OOME Third Edition) – available in both PDF and ODT formats.

These are the topics covered in the book: Language Constructs, Numerical Routines, Array Routines, Date Routines, String Routines, File Routines, Miscellaneous Routines, Universal Network Objects, The Dispatcher, StarDesktop, Generic Document Methods, Writer Documents, Calc Documents, Draw and Impress Documents, Library Management, Dialogs and Controls, and Sources of Information.

Just one caveat: although the book has been updated in 2015, it might not reflect all the changes included in the new versions of LibreOffice.

A frequently­ overlooked point of lock­-in with Microsoft Office is its default use of proprietary fonts. Contrary to the popular view, fonts are often not freely distributable, and may in fact be covered by restrictive license terms similar to proprietary software. Microsoft Office by default uses two such fonts: Calibri and Cambria. These fonts are only available in Microsoft Office, and are not freely available for download or use otherwise.