The world of documents, spreadsheets and presentations is roughly divided into two. There’s Microsoft Office, and then, there’s everything else. In the second bunch, LibreOffice features prominently, often touted as a free alternative, with a wealth of tools, options and features. I am a mostly happy user myself, although I’ve never been able to fully commit…
Continue reading →LibreOffice may seem like just another word processor, but looks can deceive. A case in point is the ability to single-source, using features that go under the deceptively simple description of Hide. Single-sourcing is the maintenance of multiple versions of a document within the same file. For example, you might three versions of a software…
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Three decades ago, StarDivision, the ancestor of LibreOffice and OpenOffice, was designed as an intermediate desktop publisher. However, many LibreOffice improvements are designed for users who insist on using it like a typewriter and entering manual formatting. Unofficially, I have been told that LibreOffice developers feel that, since manual formatting is the way most people…
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Depending on how you look at it, the world of office suites for Linux is either very rich or very poor. As the rather obscure idiom says: the tailor (hence the cliche suit reference) always goes naked. But in essence, you’re either using LibreOffice – used to be OpenOffice – or maybe something else. Probably nothing.…
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For most people, literacy means mastery of upper and lower case letters. However, there are a number of symbols used in everyday writing in English that few people formally master. Of these symbols, one of the most widely used is the bullet. Unlike most word processors, LibreOffice gives you full control over bullets, including offering…
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Office, suite, cloud. Sounds familiar. Google Docs. Yup. Microsoft Office 365. Yup. LibreOffice. No. Wait, what? Buzzwords around modern technology concepts are all too easy to ignore, but this one actually caught my attention beyond the almost-too-cliche dotIO domain, the blue design very reminiscent of Docker (hint), and optimistic text that promises wonders. Anyhow, Open365…
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When you switch to LibreOffice, you can usually assume that all the features available in other office suites are available. They might have a slightly different name, or be placed in another menu, but the basic functionality should be the same in both. If you make a note of the features you use most often,…
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Our colleague Bruce has a book coming out! It’s called Designing with LibreOffice. It tackles the subject of how to make documents look good and professional, while taking advantage of all the design features LibreOffice has to offer. So I got together with Bruce and we talked about his book, LibreOffice, design, and the eternal…
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Calligra Suite is a mature office suite, with a solid set of basic applications, as well as an integrated, often innovative set of utilities, and at least two truly outstanding tools that have developed their own popularity outside of Calligra Suite.
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The Collabora flavour of LibreOffice aimed at the public sector, officially rebranded GovOffice, will allow agencies to deploy the free office suite, leading to savings on Microsoft Office license fees and Collabora’s own licenses.
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In most of the world, the standard paper size for printing is A4. However, in North America, the standard size is Letter. These contrary standards mean that paper trays on printers and copiers need to be adjustable — and, even worse, that anything printed internationally usually has to be printed in two versions.
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Marginalia are to the sides of a document what headers and footers are to its top and bottom. Marginalia allow you to make your texts more interesting and clearer for the reader. Let’s see how to create them in LibreOffice.
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