OfficeBuzz

After several months of working on LibreLex , it was time to test it on MacOS. After all, we claim it does work there too :-) The fiends in the FourDigits office were so friendly to hand me an old Mac. Starting the Mac, browser.. OS-crash.. I remarked: "Hmm, long time ago that I worked on Windows" which of course must be painful to hear for real Mac-fans ;-) So the FourDigits guy was so friendly to lend me his new fast Macbook for a moment. Colleagues already started to mumble ... "how much of your work time will that cost..." OK, LibreOffice was already installed. So we put the folder with the templates and config-files in the user work-path. Double-click on the LibreLex extension to install.. ah, there is the LibreLex tool bar. Start New document with LibreLex.. great. Print with /without logo.. looks good. Dialogues Place and Mail.. fine too. So that's it. Works. Thanks for your help! Two minutes and it just works. "Huh.." Why huh, what's s...

A very subtile nice gradient :-) (looks best when you install it yourself - LibreOffice 3.6.0 beta 3 will be available very soon!)

Roughly a month to go before LibreOffice 3.6.0 will be finished. So it's time for a little excitement :-) An overview (in progress) of the new features is available on the wiki . The community – users as you and I – is of course assisting with tracing the bugs in the beta releases. Therefore there will be an international bug-hunt party organized on July 6 and 7! According to the plan - and with LibreOffice the plan is usually met - the release will be in the first week of August. Such a first release is of course perfect to give it a good try, but obviously not to deploy immediately in all business processes. Just be careful ;-) The 3.6.0 – I'm looking forward to it!

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 ...