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 Macro Team: progress report

Macros help users to automate common tasks in LibreOffice. In September 2019 we announced a new team in our community to work on macro support. A progress report was published in November 2019, so let’s review everything that happened since then. If you are interested in contributing to the macro team (development, testing or documentation), we’d love to hear from you – please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org and we’ll get in touch. Wiki docs Thanks to Nathan Ullberg, many wiki articles previously only available in French can now be read in English as well. Nathan also updated existing articles and created an article about manipulating LineShape objects in Impress. Detailed lists of his work can be found on his wiki user page. Alain Romedenne worked alongside Nathan with the macro articles and translations. He added LibreOffice Basic cheatsheets from Jean-François Nifenecker into the wiki and created a new article concerning input/output to screen with Python. Alain also started creating syntax diagrams for LibreOffice Basic. Code contributions from macro team members Andreas Heinisch: cInt function treats, as decimal Tab label too low within macro editor Typename function does not return the correct data type of a numeric constant Consider an

LibreOffice monthly recap: March 2020

Here’s our summary of updates, events and activities in the LibreOffice project in the last four weeks – click the links to learn more. March was a difficult month for many people around the world, so we’d like to say en extra big thank you to everyone who contributed time and effort to our software and community. LibreOffice includes a wide range of features for home users and professionals, but it can be extended further. We’re working on a new extensions and templates website, with a streamlined design and improved usability for authors and users. We’ll post more updates on this blog as it progresses! One of the many features introduced in LibreOffice 6.4 is the ability to join/merge multiple text boxes when importing PDFs. Indeed, many people have said that they find this feature especially useful, so we wrote a blog post showing it in action. Thanks to Justin Luth of SIL who implemented this feature. On March 8, we celebrated International Women’s Day. In the LibreOffice project, we try to make our community welcoming and friendly for everyone – check out this page for more info. Also in March, we posted an update about the new Board of

LibreOffice: A great choice for schools and education

Many schools, colleges and universities around the world use LibreOffice to get their work done every day. The free and open source office suite, compatible with Microsoft Office and a successor to OpenOffice(.org) with many extra features, includes a complete set of powerful tools for students and teachers: Writer – word processor Calc – spreadsheet Impress – presentation tool Draw – for technical drawings, brochures etc. Math – formula editor Base – database Benefits in education Because LibreOffice is free and open source software, students and teachers can download and install it on as many machines as they like, without worrying about license fees, subscriptions or audits. If you’re a teacher, you can be sure that your students won’t suddenly be locked out of their documents for not renewing a subscription. They can keep working, as long as they like! As well as the desktop app, there’s also LibreOffice Online, a cloud-based version of the suite that students can access via their web browsers. You can set up LibreOffice Online on your own infrastructure, with help from professional support services. Additionally, LibreOffice is backed up by a rich ecosystem, with many companies and resources available to help users: Tutorials for

Paint a Dove for Document Freedom Day

  Help us celebrate the Twelfth Anniversary of Document Freedom Day by making a paper dove! Download the dove template and the instructions from this link: https://tdf.io/dfd1, and once you are done with your dove take a picture of it and upload your photo using this link: https://tdf.io/dfd2. #DFDDove2020 #DFD2020

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