Following our interviews with Caolán McNamara at Red Hat and Thorsten Behrens at allotropia, today we’re talking to Michael Meeks from Collabora Productivity: Tell us a bit about yourself! I’m Michael Meeks, a Christian, husband and enthusiastic open source developer. I run Collabora’s Office division with the assistance of an amazing team – leading our Collabora Online and Office products, and supporting customers and partners. I’ve served as a Director of the The Document Foundation from its founding until recently, and have contributed to both the OpenDocument Format and OOXML standardization. I’d started some decades ago working on the Linux desktop in the GNOME project around the Gnumeric spreadsheet, first as a volunteer, then for Ximian – which was involved in the open-sourcing of OpenOffice.org. Since then, I’ve been involved with improving the codebase, although the name of my employer has changed from Ximian, Novell, Attachmate, Micro Focus, SUSE – and finally being spun out alongside a brave and talented subset of the SUSE LibreOffice team to Collabora Productivity some nine years ago. What does Collabora Productivity provide in the LibreOffice ecosystem? One big piece we do is improving the awesome LibreOffice Technology core engine / APIs, and performance for
Recently, Linux New Media released a special edition magazine, full of tutorials, tips and tricks about LibreOffice. And some articles were contributed by members of the LibreOffice community! Well, we have 50 issues to give away – and we’d like to get them in the hands of students, communities and other projects around the world: The magazines come with DVDs that include LibreOffice for Linux, Windows and macOS, alongside extra templates, extensions and guidebooks. So ideally, we’d like to get these magazines out to locations and communities where internet connections aren’t always available – so that the users can really benefit from the discs. So, if you can help us to distribute these magazines to students, local communities and other places, drop us a line! Let us know what you plan to do with them, and how many you need. Send us an email and let’s spread the word!
2021 is ending, so let’s recap our achievements and look forward for 2022. It has been a very tough year for all of us in our professional or personal matters, and for sure worsened by the persisting pandemic, even with the release of the COVID vaccines. But this year was a great documentation year after all. We closed the gap between the LibreOffice major releases, and the update of the corresponding User Guides. By the year end, we will have all of our version 7 guides updated to the LibreOffice release 7.2, and ready to continue for the forthcoming release – 7.3 – due in early February 2022. The goal of tracking the software release closely was achieved, and now we are in a steady state of small updates between releases. The updates and enhancements of the guides was an effort of all the team, coordinated by Jean Weber (Writer and Getting Started Guide), Steve Fanning (Calc and Base guides), Peter Schofield (Impress and Draw guides), Rafael Lima (Math guide). A number of volunteers also worked in each guide by writing and reviewing contents and suggesting improvements. A special thank to Jean Weber for making the guides available for sale
This is Software Informer’s editor rating. Work with document files either imported from programs like MS Word, Excel and other office tools or created natively in formats like ODF or PDF compatible with modern and open standards. Editing, copying and incorporating data in databases is possible. LibreOffice is an open-source free alternative to heavy commercial office suites like MS Office. While having generally the same functionality, LibreOffice is more open to modification and updates, making it a more attractive suite if you want a comfortable and adjustable tool for working with documentation. LibreOffice consists of several tools capable of working with documents of any type, from standard Word files and Excel tables to presentations and Publisher files. There’s a word processing and desktop publishing tool called Writer; spreadsheet program Calc; tool for creating effective multimedia presentations called Impress; a sketching tool named Draw; database manager Base; formula editor Math; advanced chart and diagram creator Charts. Every tool has all the features of an advanced editor for the kind of files you could work with. The tools work stable and fast, they are easy to use even if you’re not an experienced user of office tools. LibreOffice adds several unique features
Just days after the release of the Impress Guide 7.2, the LibreOffice Documentation Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of the Calc Guide 7.2, that includes the latest developments of the LibreOffice Community 7.2 Calc module. This 548 pages guide is for beginner to advanced users of Calc, the spreadsheet component of LibreOffice. You may be new to spreadsheet software, or you may be familiar with another program, this book covers the main features of Calc. The new Calc guide has been updated from Calc Guide 7.1. It covers changes that are visible in the user interface, including the new Search Commands tool, the global toolbar lock, details of the properties dialog, improvements in the Status and Sidebar, new menu entries, standard filter dialog and new cross-shaped cursor.
Thanks to the LibreOffice Documentation Team, the Impress Guide 7.2 has just arrived with the latest LibreOffice Impress 7.2 developments. This 374 pages book covers the main features of Impress, the presentations (slide show) component of LibreOffice. You can create slides that contain text, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, charts, clip art, and other objects. Impress comes with prepackaged text styles, slide backgrounds, and Help. It can open and save to Microsoft PowerPoint formats and can export to PDF, HTML, and numerous graphic formats. The full set of published LibreOffice guides is available in the LibreOffice Documentation Website. Here is the Table of Contents published in the LibreOffice Bookshelf Project: Preface Chapter 1 Introducing Impress Chapter 2 Master Slides, Styles, and Templates Chapter 3 Adding and Formatting Text Chapter 4 Adding and Formatting Images Chapter 5 Managing Graphic Objects Chapter 6 Formatting Graphic Objects Chapter 7 OLE, Spreadsheets, Charts, and Other Objects Chapter 8 Adding and Formatting Slides, Notes, Comments, and Handouts Chapter 9 Slide Shows and Photo Albums Chapter 10 Saving Slide Shows, Printing, Emailing, and Exporting Chapter 11 Setting Up and Customizing Impress Chapter 12 User Interface Variants Appendix A Keyboard Shortcuts Appendix B Toolbars The Guide update
