The Annual Report of The Document Foundation for the year 2019 is now available in PDF format from TDF Nextcloud in two different versions: low resolution (6.4MB) and high resolution (53.2MB). The annual report is based on the German version presented to the authorities in April. The 54 page document has been entirely created with free open source software: written contents have obviously been developed with LibreOffice Writer (desktop) and collaboratively modified with LibreOffice Writer (online), charts have been created with LibreOffice Calc and prepared for publishing with LibreOffice Draw, drawings and tables have been developed or modified (from legacy PDF originals) with LibreOffice Draw, images have been prepared for publishing with GIMP, and the layout has been created with Scribus based on the existing templates. All pictures are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License, courtesy of TDF Members from Albania, Brasil, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Japan, Nepal, Paraguay, Taiwan, Uganda and Turkey. Stock photos are CC0 by Pixabay. Lothar Becker, Chairman of TDF Board of Directors, has written in the welcome address: What we have achieved so far goes beyond the most optimistic forecasts of the project’s founders back in 2010. After ten years, the challenge
(clicking on the image will open a large view of the same) Today, the majority of screens and projectors is using the 16:9 aspect ratio, while in the past has been using the 4:3 aspect ratio. So, many people have a large number of slide decks based on the old 4:3 aspect ratio, which have to be converted to the new 16:9 aspect ratio. Using LibreOffice Impress in the right way, which means that all slides are based on a slide template, the conversion procedure is rather trivial, and this blog post provides a step by step tutorial. Of course, we start by opening the old 4:3 slide deck, and switching to the Slide Sorter view. We select all slides using the Edit > Select All menu command, and then we copy all slides using the Edit > Copy menu command. To create the new 16:9 slide deck, we use the File > New > Templates… menu command. From the Templates window, which opens on top of the 4:3 slide deck, we select a 16:9 template. In this case, we will open the “tdf-greenliberation” template on the lower right corner of the Templates window. The
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
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
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
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
