OfficeBuzz

One of the great tools from LibreOffice that I use regularly, it the mail merge function from Writer. Preparing a text, adding field of your data source, and via the neat Python-coded wizard you can send all those document via e-mail. Personalised. The same can be done with HTML formatting and even PDF files that will be handled as attachment.   Until recent however, there was a nasty limitation with the use of HTML formatting for sending the emails: images were not embedded. So no use of good pictures and graphics in the mails.. After this, you understand that I'm really delighted to see that in the upcoming LibreOffice 4.2.0 the embedding of graphics in HTML-mail will be possible. This thanks to Edmond Ciorba and Andras Timar. Kudoos guys :)   Rough information on these, and other features for LibreOffice 4.2.0 is on the wiki .   Note that beta 2 for the 4.2.0 is available and that very soon the first release candidate will be spread. Pls download this (mind para...

Around last weekend we had the LibreOffice 4.2.0 BugHunt Session . During three days volunteers – either known or new – added some extra steps to test the Beta version of the next LibreOffice . Compared with the weeks before, around three times more bugs were filed against that version (46/15). Overall around 25% more bugs were filed (107/80). Experienced QA volunteers worked hard to triage as many bugs as possible, but I would not be surprised if still some need to be checked, clarified... Also on the MozTrap tool people have been doing tests. This environment is especially easy for newcomers that want to do some good for their favourite office-suite ;) I'm told that there will be new test series for the release candidate 1 (in one, two weeks). So stay tuned there! And last but not least: it was again really encouraging to see that several of the reported bugs have been repaired within hours or a day or so. Thanks to the developers, thanks to all testers and other users!

At the LibreOffice conference in Milan, last week, there was a series of very interesting talks about migrations to LibreOffice. There I listened to someone talking about escaping from the claws of Microsoft. One would maybe expect such words to from one of the administrations represented, that may not be charmed by the fact that the NSA spies them. Or by a NGO, whose work may be directly affected by the FBI reading their mails and documents. After all, it was Microsoft that first gave the NSA access to its software, and thus to all the work of people and organisations using it.. But no 'escaping from the claws of Microsoft' was expressed by a business man. A large company searching hard for a way to get a bit of his freedom back in choosing office-software and freedom to pay for needs, and not for obligations. Clearly business, NGO's and administrations share more and more interest in quality office software that respects freedom and property. The LibreOffice conference a...

Since LibreOffice 4.1 there is the Sidebar as a experimental feature. While devs work on improvements and stabilising for future releases, I mostly avoid that Sidebar :) Meanwhile many people are positive about the nice looking feature... Well indeed it shows nice. And it shows huge... You may get the feeling here that I'm not so happy with the Sidebar? Indeed! I'll explain why. And of course will try to give a shot about a maybe possible improvement. Reasons why I'm not too happy is first because it eats space. Double: most of the formatting settings offered are directly available in the formatting toolbar already. Furthermore, and that's much worse, the nice presentation of all kind of formatting settings, promotes direct formatting . And direct formatting, thus hassling around without using styles, is one of the largest problems when exchanging documents with people that pay for being licensed to use office-software. All this unstructured settings may give proble...

Since LibreOffice 3.3 there are more then 500 new features and improvements listed on the pages that are published with the new releases.   With the preparations of a new release of LibreOffice of course there is the need to show the new function and improvements, extendings of existing features. Every half year this nice tasks is repeated, and of course it covers a aspects of many different sides of the suite. To me it's always a little wonder when this is done. Thanks to the information given by the developers, people as for example Marc always are able to create a nice and accessible overview. Now recently we decided to make an overview of the most important, unique possibilities in LibreOffice. And when looking through the published overviews of all the different releases, I started to count a bit and suddenly it stroke me that LibreOffice had passed the border of 500! (Here are the pages, so you can count them 4.1 / 4.0 / 3.6 / 3.5 / 3.4 / 3.3 )   Of cou...

Why you will want to read this article soon...   So that were extremely busy weeks for all people active in LibreOffice localization and QA. Today the last translations – many up to 100% – have been pulled and the last triple reviewed code commits were done. And somewhere next week already we expect the release of LibreOffice 4.1.   Many volunteers doing the translations help a lot with testing too. That extremely important job is not something that happens every now and then... it is a continuous task. Beside the translations for the major releases, twice a year. Hard work, but being a part of the community that makes the best free office suite in the world makes it worth of course :) That was what I felt very strong when reading Michaels blog, some weeks ago, on all the hard work that that the developers are doing on code improvements. Look here for many details: on cleaning, modern and faster code, easier building, automated tests, etc. etc. As a result enthusiast '...

Another nice feature in LibreOffice 4.1 (as promised in my previous blog ).. Creating a slide show with a series of photo's. This works nice and smoothly In Impress , choose Insert > Picture > Photo Album . The dialog Create Photo Album opens. Note that when you open the file dialog to Add the photo's, you can select multiple pictures at once! In the dialog Create Photo Album you have choices to add more pictures per slide, fill the slide or keep ratio, set order.. Fine with that, click Insert and see on the Slide sorter what nice result you have in a hand turn! Kudoos to Gergő Mocsi for adding this lovely feature to LibreOffice!   LibreOffice 4.1 will have it's first release candidate around June 23, and the release at the end of July. See here the full schedule for the main releases and bugfix versions of LibreOffice. The beta version is already available on pre-releases page.  

While working with the beta version of LibreOffice 4.1 it strikes me that since 3.6 so much has been improved in the interface. It's a good time to mention some of those. Some time ago already the fat, overdone old borders from the past had been gone and now I see more and more dialogs that become more elegant, prettier to work with. Some screen shots, old and new. So offering the same, uncluttered features, but better to work with. A nice improvement too is that the list Apply Styles give a good preview of the font of the styles. Completely new in 4.1 is a button that easily toggles comments in the margin on and off. Mostly the already mentioned work on the dialogs is important for the future steps of LibreOffice in a newer interface and onto new devises. As a colorful finisher, I love to mention the new default colors that are shipped. Enjoy! (And I guess I should write some more about the new that 4.1. will offer soon...)

If you haven't yet noticed: tomorrow will be the crowning of the new Dutch King: Willem Alexander. Inspired by some colourful posters, I decided to make a little funny extension for LibreOffice. Here is what it does: To put it simple: with each space you type, the character style changes so you get a chain of different formatted words. Downloaden en documentation on the Nou&Off site . Though it's just fun, it's a good case to see what you can do with styles, macro's, extensions. And there might be some nice ideas that can be added for future parties? Enjoy :-)