OfficeBuzz

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 :-)

Time for my notes from the LibreOffice conference 2012 , in Berlin recently. The week was well organised by our friends of the German LibreOffice community. The location was at a ministry, close to station Berlin Hauptbahnhof. And the weather was excellent, so the 10 minutes walk from the hotel to the conference venue could be done in a T-shirt. Mid October :-) So, what items do I really want to mention? First there was the positive key-note by Jeremy Allison from Google . Included in his presentation were two slides that make extremely clear what the value of open source is for Google .. .. and for others too!   A beautiful project is the localization of LibreOffice in Arabic . Because of the language structure, that needs some more attention then just doing the translating. The support for languages with what 'we' call complex text layout (CTL-support – see Tools > Options > Language settings ..) has to be improved on various points. Various spe...

Chances to save millions, but with talking alone you won't get that far   My previous two blogs pointed out that when public administrations make a combined investment in open source software, migrating will become easier, that they themselves profit as well as all other (government) users will do. Governments from Germany and Switzerland already do so . In The Netherlands municipalities can save millions of Euro's each year, with open source office software alone. Now tomorrow, September 12, we have national elections in the Netherlands. In relation to that the topic open source has, as far as I've noticed, been touched by the parties GroenLinks and SP. Besides that, also the party PvdA mentions it and of course it's important for the Piratenpartij. [1]   The past has shown that for the most parties open source software (and open standards) are important. But how useful is 'attention'? It would be really helpful if the new Tweede Kamer (parliament) wou...

Millions to be saved each year with the use of open source office-software   In the previous article I wrote about administrations in Germany and Switzerland that invest in open source software. In a combined project they improve interoperability of LibreOffice and OpenOffice with the latest file formats of Microsoft Office. These administrations almost literally put their hands at work in the important field of open source software. What can I write about the situation at Dutch administrations in this field? The use of open source software in Dutch municipalities can be seen in various parts. At the backside it is done in the form of servers and management systems for websites. And on the desktop one sees Firefox and Zarafa , that is increasingly gaining popularity as Exchange/Outlook replacer.   The use of open source office software is not yet widely spread and it grows slowly. It's exactly this that I want to look at further. Because of my own profession in Nou...

Just before the start of the vacations the news was published about several public administrations make a strong investment in open source software. A project was started to improve the interoperability of LibreOffice and OpenOffice with the latest file formats of Microsoft Office. [1] The parties involved invest a sum of 140.000 Euro in the project. That is what open source really is about: as user of a product you can support the development of features that are important for you. Simple, direct. The products quality growths and the value increases too, also for other users. It's logic that administrations too invest in this way in the quality of their tools. The project that we talk about here, is about improving the interoperability. Important, because a insufficient interoperability is a source of frustration and limited freedom. [2] , [3] More freedom in the use of office software is extra important, because that opens the doors to use open source for the desktop. Op...