OfficeBuzz

LibreOffice 3.5 will beat Excel in speed on certain tasks. The upcoming first beta of the free office suite will perform better than Excel as the result of community work, thus showing the real advantage of open source software. At December 28 and 29 there will be a big international bug-hunting session with the beta release of 3.5.0. LibreOffice 3.5.0 beta1 will be on the servers in the next days. Where previously Calc, the spreadsheet component of LibreOffice, was not rewarded for high performance, the new version will bring some good news. This has been made possible by the true open source character of the project, where various developers, volunteers and full time, cooperated to improve the speed when opening documents with a large amount of named ranges, sheets and formulas. This can be read from a blog from Kohei Yoshida , one of Calcs leading developers and a major LibreOffice contributor right from the beginning of the project. Various speed tests were posted there, and one s...

Last Saturday we had already our 4th LibreOffice hackEvent in Netherland/Flanders. Again we were able to do a nice variety of work: documentation, build environments, study functions in code, translation work .. Honestly, often not that complicated at all. Nevertheless, the term 'hacking' might sound scaring for the average reader, though many and real easy hacks can be found at LibreOffice. In any case, while talking, we decided that the next event will be dedicated to the testing of the new LibreOffice 3.5.0, that will be released in February. So the next time no hacking and just normal testing. Well, 'normal'... to do some good testing you really have to be awake! So also because of the nice coffee ;-) thanks to the people that were so kind to invite us to their place for this event, MadLab at Eindhoven.

Looking forward to the next week with great pleasure :-) First - apart from regular work - further furnishing the new Nou&Off office . Then I look forward to the 4th Dutch LibreOffice Hackers event, of which the preparations of course already have started. Don't miss this opportunity to work and exchange with other hackers Before that, an event of at least the same importance wild be held: the ODF-plugfest, Gouda, November 17 and 18. I'm asked to represent TDF and LibreOffice with both info on technical issues and the general progress of the project. Will be a great pleasure to join there! Just as a good final action for the past week, I just posted the presentation on easy hacking LibreOffice that I gave at T-Dose, the Saturday before.

The LibreOffice project will be well presented at T-Dose : Technical Dutch Open Source Event, Eindhoven, this weekend. There will be four members that make a contribution as speaker on various subjects, and a simple booth with stickers and people to meet. Since it's mostly Dutch, read my Dutch blog for more ;-)

Some readers asked me about the further information that I promised about the recent LibreOffice conference :-) Eh sorry! Have been bit busy with presentation on LibreOffice for the OpenSourceLab , new article for Linux Magazine, finding new office for the company (succeeded :-) ) and also a large project to get me some food in the kitchen. OK so already a fairly large number of the presentations given, is available on the LibreOffice wiki ! Among those, also my presentation about improving the QA Release cycle – with special focus on the coming LibreOffice 3.5.0. Interesting numbers about bugs and fixing of those in the developer versions (master). And good ideas, learned during the presentation and discussion, about working smarter. I'll come back on this later! Before me, I've some notes I made during the conference. Just some things I found positive, interesting.. * We talked about leadership in the project, and to help people finding their way, so that they can start wi...

Already the start of last day of the wonderful first ever LibreOffice conference . Before preparing the final bits for my presentation on QA (improving the Development / QA cycle - so that means a talk about understanding the interesting and complicated interaction between development and QA-community, and hopefully some smart contributions from the public to get seemingly random improvements) let me post some notices on the event. First there is a great number of presentations and discussions. We started with an impressing overview, by Italo, Michael and Florian, of the first years' achievements of TDF. Impressive numbers, some polished to an very shiny state. But hey, marketing is marketing after all, and also without the footnotes that would make some of them look more realistic: we may be very proud with the people that are involved and all product improvements and the tooling and community that are set up! Nice words about those were spoken by Simon, at the evening organised b...

So, this was a busy and inspiring day. About hacking, sadly that happened only a little. Someone had his laptop stolen this morning, others were getting the build environment in shape again after different use, experimental OS-installations, another still hacking the Windows build system.. In effect there was only *one* building system: mine ;-) Which Rob gratefully used to work on the Scanner window. So Joost, who delivered a patch earlier (renaming sheets in Calc while copying) and I looked the code, hunting for ideas / hacks at various places in the code. You know, the things that you hope/expect to be not tooooo complicated. Yes, those ;-) Was good and I learned some useful things. Sad still, that little work in the code was done this day. Nevertheless, all 7 that attended were pretty happy with the gathering. There was a lot to talk about things that happened since last year. What is so obvious for the people that are active in the international project week after week, can be com...

Last weekend there was a tremendous event for LibreOffice hackers in Münich. [1]. More than 30 people joining for some days and working on features, bugs, UX (and pasta ..) It's obvious that there is a great base of LibreOffice users and devs in Germany (and Italy ;-) ) What about The Netherlands and Flanders? We had some small events already last year. With between 5 to 10 people joining and learning about, cooperating on localisation, development, features.. The next Saturday we have a new event planned. In the science city of Eindhoven. We also invite the old friends from OOo to share about all that's going on and cooperation. More on the wiki [2]. 1] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Hackfest2011 2] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/NL/bijeenkomst_11-09-10

It's been a while since I wrote here. And now some bits about LibreOffice development... I won't start explaining much technical details here - that is beyond my competences. But recently I have been hanging around some day's on the developers IRC channel. That was for some help to get used to building LibreOffice from source because I like to work/test with new features, and to dig a bit in the code here and there. Well building LibreOffice turns out to be really simple [1]. Not that is is necessary to do for bleeding edge testing: there are nightly builds available regularly [2]. When I say: building LibreOffice is really simple, I have to add that this is on Linux mainly. Which brings me more to the core message of this blog post. While being on IRC and also lurking on the developer list -as usual- I became very much impressed by all the hard and tough work that the developers do. The ones doing it as full time job, but not less the ones that do it alongside other ...

For those able to read Dutch, or só much interested that they want to make the effort to learn it ;-) there is my Dutch blog post , explaining my opinion on the start of OpenOffice.org as an incubator project at the Apache Software Foundation. Very short summary: quite some concerns, and missing the opportunity of the forces grown around LibreOffice, but not fully negative - maybe there grows something good.

Honestly a day one should not miss: * hacking LibreOffice code together * working with others on documentation * looking at the new features ... An interesting, open day for users and other active members in the OpenOffice.org/ LibreOffice community. More details at the wiki of the Dutch language group in the TDF.

Today, April 15, Oracle announced that they will follow a different route with OpenOffice.org. Oracle no longer looks at it as a commercial product, but will hand it all over to a community, a foundation or something like that. An organisation where all parties feel comfortable. This news can be read from this article , where Chief Architect Edward Screven is cited. On The Register I read an analysis , that was advised to me by 'an anonymus source' as 'interesting'. So where will Oracle find a place for OpenOffice.org? Since September 28 2010 there is The Document Foundation, where a large part of the former OpenOffice.org community joined to continue working on the product in a free project, in an independent organisation. Oracle did not want to join by then - therefore now The Document Foundation releases the program LibreOffice, and not OpenOffice.org... Then today Oracles remarkable change in course. This is a big step forward in the direction that I expressed as a ...

Last weeks Thursday, March 24, five Dutch LibreOffice hackers met for a special event: we were invited at the yearly congress of the NoiV – a Dutch governmental institute for the adoption of open standards and open source. We were there to show how developing open source works. All five of us have widely varying experience and skills. Speaking for myself, I am not really the most experienced C++ developer, far from that, but still could do useful work during the event and helping understanding features etc. Even more: our different backgrounds definitely helped us, to have a very interesting and useful day. Not only did we some good work on some interesting and useful code: we also learned a lot of each others skills, of the work itself, and as bonus were able to explain other people at the congress the suite and our work. So first some pictures: (see pictures one and two from Paul Ridderhof on flickr). Pieces of code we worked on and had a look at were - toggle function for Notes i...

One of the features why LibreOffice en OpenOffice.org excel is the native use of the open, ISO-certified ODF file format. ODF is evolved from the first complex XML fike format designed for office-documents, back in 2000 by the at that time very new OpenOffice.org project. One of the features of an xml based file is that the content can be read and edited as flat text. Not rather convenient for daily use; however very powerful for automated tasks and small extra tricks. I want to share an example of the last possibility here. Basic is, that everything that you can set in a document for formatting, content end so forth, can be found in standardised xml documents. Therefore sometimes new features in your favourite ODF supporting suite, can only be implemented as a standard, once the ODF file format is extended for that use. A recent example: coloured tabs in Calc. The other way round is possible too: there can be a feature supported by the file format, that you do not (yet) find in the us...

While the train drives me to Arnhem, let me write a little report from FOSDEM 2011. Short version: it was a really good weekend :-) Bit longer: as usual the booth at this great European free and open source software event, is an extreme mixture of meeting new people, discussing the work and product, enjoying the opportunity to better learn people from the community. You may notice that I do not mention the chance for gathering knowledge and improving technical skills, by visiting presentations and workshops. Well, that obviously was hardly relevant for me, since I was at the booth the most of the time. Another special thing in this weekend was meeting some friends from OpenOffice.org that were at the same place ;-) For LibreOffice we had a nice booth in the main building of the event, where we could sell shirts and hand over stickers. Both developers and people working on less technical stuff, talked all Saturday with so many people, explaining more about the history of The Document Fo...

Recently I visited a business relation, Hans de Vries from the Securityacademy , whom I helped last year with a nice basic script to correct bullets in Impress. Of course we discussed LibreOffice. Hans is expert on security and safety for many years now. But long before he worked in the university area, and from that time he remembered discussions with enthusiastic unix and open source developers, who didn't have much appetite to join OpenOffice.org. They didn't like to share copyrights for code-contributions with Sun, as was asked. Personally, I do not weight that issue so heavy (but frankly, I am not a developer at thàt level..), but I know it is an issue for others. Anyhow, I find it striking that it is this story that pops up, when talking about LibreOffice. Needless to say that Hans is very much interested in our project.