OfficeBuzz

Years and years ago I was visiting the region of Lyon - of course by bike. At one morning I entered a little village early and visited the local market to get me some nice fruit and vegs. One of the stalls was a bit strange. The man had really wide baskets, but with only a little bit of fruit in them. I could think of some boites hidden at another place for more, but wondered why that was so. So I asked the man just if he liked to show his fruits with so much space. The man friendly explained to me that is was a matter of education. For him, when you see an abundance of fruits, it may seem that it's all so easy, comes at little cost. But for the grower that was not at all the case. He summed to me all things he had to spend time and money on before he could go to market with the results of his hard work, with selling fruit. Items as keeping the paths in good state, preparing compost and covering soil with it, pruning trees, repairing the roof of the grange, buying clothes to work ...

At the beginning of the new year, the Tilburg University organizes the Tilburg Orientation Program (TOP) presenting all kind of interesting and cool stuff for the new students. So at August 22, a nice and sunny day, there was a huge event in a park with lots of plays and booths and music and beer. And: three people from the Dutch LibreOffice team were there! We had a nice booth and prepared both flyers and small cards. Especially the cards were handsome to reach out to people: "want a free card for free software" is a short and appealing message. Thus we handed out a six to seven hundred of the cards. Of course we had good talks too: dozens of individuals and groups wanted more information. And there are people that know and use open source. Or were just in need for a good office-suite for their new bought Mac book ;) It's always interesting to see how people react. For example if you tell that Microsoft doesn't really loves students, when they offer software very ...

One of the big advantages of LibreOffice has been, for a long time, that it offers the well known menu based user interface to its users. Less known, is that LibreOffice also has solutions for the group users that is quite well used to different interfaces: the Notebookbar! Over time LibreOffice worked on the concept of the Notebookbar, and that got supported by the working with Glade-designer for the user interface. With it's tabbed view, it looks as a notebook ;) The Notebookbar itself also has multiple forms: Tabbed, Contextual Single and Contextual Groups. It can easily be seen in the next 5.3 release, if experimental features are turned on. The official 5.3-release is end of January. LibreOffice offers an ideal solution for people that prefer to work with either a menu, or with a side bar, or with a more block-like interfaces! Settings Tools > Options > LibreOffice General > Advanced … check Experimental features View > Toolbar Layout > Default/...

It has been a bit quiet. On this blog. And apparently also at the Dutch government with regard open standards. If that would be the case at all, then now there is some very good news. In the attendance discussing the "Actieplan Open Overheid" ("Plan for action on open government") the parliament adopted a resolution to make the use of open standards mandatory. Mandatory for the countries government and the regional/local administrations. By law. This, finally, will put an end to the halfheartedly policy in this area. An excellent example is easy to spot at the parliament's website: the resolution is published in an old proprietary format.. In any case: excellent news. And thanks to MP Astrid Oosenbrug for her competent and tireless work for a saner approach for the countries ICT. And of course to all other MP's that understand the importance of this. The resolution also asks the government to improve sharing the knowledge they have on open source softwa...

The giant from Redmond must be desperate since it has to use a controversial story from a relatively small Italian city to combat open source software, as in the mean time many larger deployments also in Italy are happy with LibreOffice and the numbers produced by Provincia di Perugia prove the opposite of the Microsoft-publication. Microsoft writes about the switch of the city of Pesaro from OpenOffice to Office 365. There are however many questions around the publication that should provide backing for the switch. Yet Microsoft uses that publication on it's website for promotion goals. There are several facts that make the publication controversial. It mentions, for example, the sum of € 300.000 for migration and training costs and extra phone costs of € 85 a year without any data to back that. Sonia Motegiove, an Italian IT consultant, comments that an extensive training for 600 people would cost € 25.000 maximum. The publication also claims that the interface would cause p...

LibreOffice is entering the mobile and on-line space, and we'll see full open source private cloud solutions soon. Great! Still sometimes I'm forced to look back. Simply because the name "Open Office" is known by many people, based on its great history. I have to explain regularly what LibreOffice is and what makes it so much different. To put some more weight on the latter, my colleague Barend and me worked on comparison of the features of LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice. Read it here . Be warned: it's a nearly 60 page document. It focuses on areas as feasibility, smart use, quality and improvements, localization and more. It lists hundreds of smaller and larger improvements in LibreOffice, and only few in Apache OpenOffice. There is a notable difference between this information and many comparisons of LibreOffice with Apache OpenOffice found in articles on the internet. Journalists often seem to lack time for a better analysis of the vast amount of feature...

What brings more joy then publishing a guide on Document Freedom Day to help scholars making beautiful work with a free open document standard? Therefore today the Dutch Language LibreOffice-community made available the publication "Maak je mooiste werkstuk met LibreOffice Writer" ("Create your most beautiful work with LibreOffice Writer"). The guide is for scholars in the age of 11 and older. Currently the publication is Dutch only, but will be available in other languages soon thanks to the ODF Authors-community. There will also be a version for scholars in the age of 9-11 year. Download here . And read the full announcement here .

During trainings in LibreOffice Writer, that we give at customers offices or in the LibreOffice-Trainingcenter , a standard part is how to handle AutoCorrect. As long as people don't know what happens, AutoCorrect is a source of annoyance and errors. Once they've learned how it works, this changes drastically. Recently during a training for a regional office if the Dutch Refugee Council there was attention for the example "aanrijken" that is replaced by "aanreiken" through the AutoCorrect function. (Since we know AutoCorrect is language dependent, it's time for a little help in this English version of the original Dutch blogpost. The correct word "aanreiken" means: hand over, give something to someone else. The wrong word "aanrijken" has the part "rijk" what means rich. So, now back to the plot of the story ;) ) During the training I gave the next, free, explanation for the example: we see enough of the 'aanrijken...

Let me start with the second part of the head line of this article. Munich is a success. And not a little one too. Already during the 9 year long migration to LiMux (looking for a reason why Microsoft can't count 9 ;) ) the saved money counts to 11 Mln Euro. From the money spent to consultancy, nearly 50% has benefited (regional) SMB. The user satisfaction has clearly increased - though there are still items in which improving is possible. More then 14.000 of the 15.000 systems have been migrated. A larger number then was set as target. De savings on licenses will count, year after year, millions. (Also see Symposium LibrOffice in de Praktijk ) Now is this news? Not really. But it is something we cannot repeat enough - brief and clear. There only needs to be one Microsoft-partner driven 'investigation' ( see.. and this.. ) or one new major who recently has been doing business with Microsoft ( see.. ) and there are new headlines seeding wrong impressions. FUD. Let's ...

Now and then people ask me about LibreOffice or OpenOffice. Usually I point to the statistics about number of developers and such. And to the large difference in new functions. And of course the fixed old bugs. After explaining that to an artist, he came up with a nice drawing that I don't want to hide for you. A nice and funny drawing. On the other hand it's of course possible that such a split in a - originally single - project has negative impact on peoples joy in work and ambitions. And might that be the case - it's something that I always regret - I do hope that time will have a healing influence. As it usually does.

No, this has nothing to do with a possible match during the soccer worldcup. It is about open source. Look at the German city Munich, where they started in 2005 to migrate to open source. In 2013 the project was finished successful. A migration that resulted in 14.000 of the 15.000 seats running among others Linux at the desktop and LibreOffice. Significant investments have been made, but already now there are savings of 11 million Euro . The money that has been spent, of course will benefit the regional economy to a large extend. Smart! There is by the way also a report that says that Munich loses money on the project, but that reports makes wrong assumptions and is - what a coincidence - written on request of Microsoft by its partner HP, that gives no underlying info . So all municipalities: do take good notice of this , for in case someone uses that manipulated report to give a negative advise on open source! So fine, a significant use of open source does make sense. Do the peo...

Yesterday there was a great Ubuntu release party in Apeldoorn where at least four members of the Dutch language LibreOffice community joined. And since our friend Luc had to leave early, I was asked to present about LibreOffice. My audience appreciates a little explanation about the history of LibreOffice. So via an explanation on making LibreOffice an attractive and active open source project, easy to build, fast delivering contributions and with a great amount of developers and hackers - which all is achieved - and modernising and improving the huge code base - which is well on it's way - I ask if people know the release schedule with two main releases every year. Many do not. So I explain that, the relation with the schedule of other main free software projects, and end up counting releases for our 4.2 series, of which only last week the 4.2.4.2 was released. And from the very first alpha of this series, around 16 versions have been released in six months time. Indeed an impre...

19.999 days young, and still celebrate the second lustrum .. how can that be possible ? It's possible when you are me and started your company on April 16 2004 :) It's a very busy time the last months at Nou&Off , but wishing not to let pass this joyous moment unnoticed, it was decided at the last moment to do a little party in a smaller circle. To pay attention to it in wider circles, later this year a symposium will be organized around the use of open source office-software in Dutch administrations, institutions and companies. At the same time as the 10 years anniversary of Nou&Off, there was the official opening of the LibreOffice-Trainingcenter . That was expected earlier, but due to the high workload on projects, it slipped. Luckily, sooner or later, all will be fine ;)

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.