OfficeBuzz

I am one of a generation in which openness grew. Open communication, and still attempting to be true. Those themes were 'hot'. And luckily, such a period is not unique. Of course there always are processes in which it is impossible to be fully open at any moment. Some topics are sensible business wise or political and can better be traded with in a small committee. It went pretty well with the 'openness' as far as I am concerned. Also in hierarchical relations: child – parent, employee – boss, citizen – government. I wanted to talk a bit more about that government. Not with thoughts about 'open politics' and 'behind closed doors' being objectionable or not. That's something I can do at other places. Here I want to talk about our authorities and open data and open tools. As a result of the growing awareness in the society around IT and the costs and risks of closed software and closed file-formats, the Dutch Parliament in that time expressed itself i...

(read this blog in Dutch) Today 8 years ago I launched my company Nou&Off: dedicated to support for OpenOffice and the last years of course increasingly LibreOffice. Before that, I worked in a company providing consultancy for larger projects in Ms Word. But my ideas about fair policy did not really match with that from the guys in Redmond. So after a while, I ended up in the open source market. Relatively new too me, so I learned a lot. 8 years also means quite some projects in larger and smaller organisations, which adds some experience too. I've seen successes and failures in migrations. Of course the complexity of the automation always is a factor that has large influence on all that has to be done. And the focus of the involved employees in the project, is a key for success or failure. Sometimes the idea settles that it's not important to look early and consistent at certain possible issues. Or unexpectedly other (more important?) projects take the focus from the offi...

On Saturday, March 31, six members of the Dutch Language community gathered for a next Hackers event. Alas, due to family circumstances I was unable to join, but Luc kindly send me this report of the event: " The session was hosted by Hans de Vries, in his office near Utrecht, Netherlands, quickly after arrival we fired up our laptop's got the Wifi going and departed on our journey. Two streams of activities quickly developed, one on hacking the code itself, another one around documentation. We worked on both during the whole day, spend a significant amount of time on getting to know each other: "who are you", "what is your background", etc. Code work was done on some patches for code improvement and curing build errors in debug mode. Working from home via the Internet this personal contact is valuable and helps to speed up the interaction and hence our output! We left late afternoon with our personal batteries charged and thanked Hans for his hospitality....

When I'm sitting in the train, or even better, on a sunny terrace, I see many heads bound, The thumbs and fingers move swiftly over de screens of the newest gadgets, that are used nowadays to share our information. Little tweed, Apps, site here and there... Who talks about sustainability of digital documents in this world? Still there is the DocumentFreedomDay . For years already. And I was invited there to present LibreOffice. It makes fun and is challenging in a time, as is sketched with the first sentences, to be invited to explain why it is important that we, I, you, our society in twenty, sixty, three hundred years still can have access to the information that we currently consider important enough to spend our precious time on. And that you will be able to use these documents, also now, without being forced to spend money to do so. To me, that always is the linking step to the need of a powerful office-application that works with free, open document standards. So that people ...

Free software exists thanks to the involvement of users. For that reason we have regular meetings in our Dutch language community. Working on the items that you like. Or that you consider important. And this is an open, relaxing atmosphere. So, on March 31 there will already be our sixth 'hackers-event'. But since there is a equal amount of people with interest for documentation, I just call it 'hacking and writing'. Well, thinking of the effort that a writer spends on a good text, how strong he must hack in possible features, examples, explanations... One could call that a sort of hacking, isn't it? Don't let the real hackers, the ones that dive diep in all the code, dependencies and more, read this ;-) Ah yes, more information (in Dutch) via this link !

If you would like to read the Dutch version of the announcement and see the translated text on the great graphics by Italo Vignoli ... it is here on my Dutch language blog!

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...