TDF Community Blog

LibreOffice allows left-handed users to move the vertical scroll bar from the right side to the left side of the screen with a simple procedure. You must open LibreOffice Options dialog window with the menu Tools > Options… Then, go first to the Language Settings > Languages window to set the document language to Asian, and second to the LibreOffice Writer > View window to set the vertical ruler as left aligned.

LibreOffice will immediately move the vertical scroll bar to the left of the screen. This will help left handed users to avoid crossing the screen with the mouse cursor each time they need to scroll the document.

 LibreOffice Calc allows to select a large number of cells without using the mouse (which might be rather awkward if the area is extremely large). To select the area, it is necessary to enter the range in the Name Box. For instance, to select the cells between A1 and I20, as in the picture on the left, you enter A1:I20 and press Enter on the keyboard.

LibreOffice allows to add comments to Writer documents, with the menu Insert > Comment (shortcut: Ctrl+Alt+C). Comments can be added to a single word, a sentence, a paragraph, a link, or a specific point in the text. This feature is useful, for instance, to collect comments on a document before the final version. Comments have a different color for each user, to make it easier to attribute them to the right person. The down arrow on the right side of each comment allows to delete the single comment, all comments from an author, all comments from all authors, or to format all comments.

LibreOffice offers a powerful search and replace option of regular expressions – like, for instance, tabs, soft line breaks and empty paragraphs – based on the powerful International Components for Unicode (ICU) Regular Expressions engine. A complete list of the regular expressions can be found on the ICU Project website.

A list of the regular expressions most used by LibreOffice can be accessed via the dialog windows which opens when you enter Edit > Find & Replace… Clicking on the Other Options… arrow, you expand the list, from which you can select Regular Expressions. Hitting the Help button opens the relevant help page.

Half way down the page, under Regular Expression, you can find a link to the list. Additional links at the end of the page provide further info on the topic.

Libreoffice offers a number of different icon sets, which can be selected from the menu Tools > Options > LibreOffice > View. The default Linux icon set is called Human, while the default Windows icon set is called Tango.

Together with Galaxy and Oxygen, they have been the available options for quite a long time (although there have been several improvements to the design of the icons).

The modern Breeze and the monochromatic Sifr (the default icon set on MacOS X) are the new additions. Sifr has been introduced with LibreOffice 4.2, while Breeze has been announced with LibreOffice 5.0.

Last, but not least, there is a specific High Contrast icon set for specific applications.