LibreOffice Weekly Clippings – July 5, 2020

LibreOffice LibreOffice 6.4.5 Now Available for Download LibreOffice 6.4.5 Now Available for Download LibreOffice 6.4.5 Released with over 100 Bug Fixes, Now Ready for Enterprise Deployments – 9to5Linux LibreOffice Productivity Suite 6.4.5 – An Excellent “FREE” Substitute for Microsoft Office LibreOffice 6.4.5 Released with over 100 Bug Fixes, Now Ready for Enterprise Deployments LibreOffice 6.4.5 Released with over 100 Bug Fixes, Now Ready for Enterprise Deployments LibreOffice 6.4.5 Released with over 100 Bug Fixes, Now Ready for Enterprise Deployments LibreOffice slips out another 7.0 beta New LibreOffice 7.0 Bug Hunting Ready to Begin New LibreOffice 7.0 Bug Hunting Ready to Begin Interesting OASIS Open Joins Open Source Initiative

Community Member Monday: Andreas Heinisch

Today we’re talking to Andreas Heinisch, who recently became a member of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice… Tell us a bit about yourself! I am from South Tyrol, and live near the city of Meran/Merano on the mountain side. I studied computer science, and teach informatics, physics and mathematics at the local high schools. In my spare time, I like to go hiking, climbing, and of course programming 🙂 What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now? At the moment I am part of the Macro team, and try to solve some of the bug reports. I don’t remember exactly, but I think that I contributed to about over a dozen of them. Personally, I think macros are not without controversy due to the security concerns, but they are widely used in order to automate some easy tasks. Why did you decide to become a member of TDF? In my teaching activity, there’s only a small part where I can really program or solve some challenging problems. So I decided to join an open source project in order to contribute to the community, get in touch with current software lifecycle technologies and to improve

openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference 2020 Will Take Place Online

Organizers of the openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference, along with the project’s boards, have made the decision to change the conference to an online conference. The uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on travel, conference planning, logistics and possibility for attendees to come to the event were reasons for shifting the event from a physical event to an online event. Shifting the conference online is good news and the organisers intend to provide a great conference that is filled with insightful talks, technical presentations and sessions dedicated for those who want to socialise during the event. Using a video conferencing tool, attendees will learn about new technologies in openSUSE and LibreOffice and have the chance to chat to developers and ask questions. Communities involved in marketing, design, QA and other topics will be able to meet online, catch up and exchange ideas. The Call for Papers (CfP) will remain open and people can continue to submit their talks until July 21. The submissions for the CfP will continue to take place on the Open Source Event Manager (OSEM) instance at https://events.opensuse.org. The collection of submissions will be organized in the OSEM tool, but the online event will take place

LibreOffice Tuesday T&T: Windows 7 SP1

Microsoft released Windows 7 on October 22, 2009, and ended the support on January 14, 2020. Technical assistance and software updates from Windows Update that help protect PCs are no longer available for the product. Microsoft released the first Service Pack for Windows 7, also known as Windows 7 SP1, in February 2011, just a few days after the release of LibreOffice 3.3, the very first release after the fork. Only the first few versions of LibreOffice could run without Windows 7 SP1, which was turning Windows 7 into a stable operating system by solving 893 bug fixes and 77 security fixes. In 2020, we still receive complaints from users who cannot install LibreOffice because the system asks them to install Windows 7 SP1. Nine years after the release of Service Pack 1 they are surprised when they are told to update their operating system. Although Windows 7 users are now a minority, the fact that there are people who have unconsciously used their completely unsecure PCs for years is a sign of a global security issue, as these users would not behave in a different way when using a different OS. Anyway, users who are requested to update their

Document Freedom in 2020

In the age of the cloud, most people think they don’t have “real” files any more, as these have been replaced by pointers in an online system. They don’t realise they have lost their freedom until they download the file to edit it on their laptop. At that point, they realize that without buying a proprietary office suite they are unable to access their very own contents, as these are hostage of a proprietary file format. Something that wouln’t have happened if they had chosen the standard Open Document Format (ODF), which can be fully implemented by any software vendor without special permission, and without having to reverse engineer an obfuscated pseudo-standard format owned by a single company. Back in 2012, European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes said: “Open standards create competition, lead to innovation, and save money,” while announcing the publication of a new policy to help public authorities avoid dependence on a single ICT supplier. At the time, following the recommendations of the new approach against lock-in could save the EU’s public sector more than € 1.1 billion a year. Working with open standards – rather than specifying a single ICT brand, tool, system, or product – when

10 great LibreOffice-only features

LibreOffice is the successor project to OpenOffice, which had its last major release (4.1) back in 2014, as you can see in this timeline – click to enlarge. And, of course, it’s still free and open source: We release a new major version every six months – so let’s check out some of the great features our community and certified developers have added in recent years! 1. Improved compatibility – .docx export LibreOffice Writer, the word processor, can export documents in .docx format (OOXML), as used by Microsoft Office. Many other compatibility improvements have been added too. 2. NotebookBar user interface Since LibreOffice 6.2, we have an alternative user interface option called the NotebookBar. To activate it, go to View > User Interface > Tabbed. 3. EPUB export Want to create e-books from your documents? With LibreOffice, you can! Click File > Export and choose EPUB, which can be read on many e-book devices. 4. Document signing For improved security, you can use OpenPGP keys to sign and encrypt ODF, OOXML and PDF documents. (ODF is the OpenDocument Format, the native format of LibreOffice.) 5. Pivot charts Calc, LibreOffice’s spreadsheet, lets you create charts from pivot tables. This helps you