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The brilliant and highly motivated developers of the open source community have created an amazing menagerie of free tools for doing things that computer users around the world used to have to pay for: video editors, photo processors, web browsers, and development platforms. The centerpiece of this ambitious collection is the versatile LibreOffice office suite – an enterprise-ready toolset for composing and managing word-processing documents, databases, spreadsheets, presentations, and much more. LibreOffice runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and, if you don’t already have it, you can download it for free or install it from the DVD attached to this issue. The LibreOffice user interface is very intuitive, and most users just see the edges of it. They start it up and learn what they need to know for a…

LibreOffice Installation Files The DVD attached to this issue includes installation files for setting up the full version of LibreOffice on the following systems: ■ 64-bit Windows ■ 32-bit Windows ■ 64-bit macOS ■ 64-bit macOS (Apple Silicon) ■ 64-bit Linux for deb systems ■ 64-bit Linux for RPM systems Installation packages for the latest version are included in separate files. Consult the documentation for your package manager or see “Introducing LibreOffice” on page 8 of this issue for more on installing LibreOffice. Lots More! As an extra bonus, this DVD also includes a collection of other valuable resources to help you extend and learn about LibreOffice. Look inside for: ■ Handbooks – the complete set of LibreOffice Handbooks with hundreds of pages of help and reference in PDF format…

Introducing LibreOffice

A complete, feature-rich, privacy-oriented office suite, compatible with Microsoft documents, and totally free – such a thing can’t really exist, right? There must be a catch somewhere! Well, no. There’s no catch, no hidden costs, and no data mining or feeding your documents to some sinister “artificial intelligence engine” (see the “Privacy Minded” box). LibreOffice [1] is indeed a complete suite of office tools, for zero cost, and it doesn’t make money through adverts or selling your data. The reason LibreOffice is free is simple: It’s made by a worldwide community, driven by volunteers who are passionate about high-quality productivity software that’s free for everyone to use. LibreOffice’s goal is to bridge “digital divides,” making powerful tools available to everyone, regardless of their income, location, or language. Indeed, LibreOffice’s user interface…

Introducing LibreOffice

Back in the 1980s, a word processor was essentially a text editor with some extra features – in other words, a tool for processing your words. Today, however, everyone expects much more from a program like this: rich layout features, high compatibility with other office software, and the ability to structure and navigate complex documents. Writer, LibreOffice’s word processor, is an exceptionally powerful tool with a styles system that really helps to maintain consistency in your documents – but more on that later. First of all, let’s get familiar with the basics! When you launch LibreOffice and choose a new Writer document (or if you’re already running the app, go to File | New | Text Document in the menu), a window (Figure 1) will open with the following features:…

Form Plus Function

Calc is LibreOffice’s spreadsheet module. The equivalent of Microsoft Excel, Calc is designed to be closely compatible with it. Each Calc worksheet (Figure 1) is capable of handling 16,384 columns and 1,048,576 rows, more than enough for most purposes. If you need more, or find that a spreadsheet crashes on a memory-challenged machine, consider creating a database in LibreOffice Base. In case you are a complete beginner, spreadsheets like Calc are more or less a sophisticated version of the tables found in text documents. In fact, in LibreOffice Writer, tables can be set up to use a few simple spreadsheet features. Spreadsheet is the name given to a file, and worksheet to the pages within the file. On each worksheet, columns are designated by uppercase letters, and rows by Arabic…

Form Plus Function

Perfect Presentations

The term “PowerPoint” has become synonymous with presentations in general, even if the file was made in a different program. Presentation software dates back to the early 1980s, with tools such as VCN ExecuVision, which let users add images to text and display them in a slideshow format. LibreOffice’s presentation component is called Impress, and it’s an immensely versatile tool with features and special effects galore. So let’s dive into it! Start LibreOffice and choose a new Presentation (or if you’re already running the app, go to File | New Presentation in the menu). You’ll be presented with a list of preinstalled templates, so choose one you like, and a new Impress document will open displaying the following features: 1. Tab bar: Click on the tabs to switch between different…

Perfect Presentations

Libre Office Draw [1], a free vector-based mathematical drawing program, helps you create anything from the simplest sketch to a complex diagram. A page-orientated, object-based program, Draw’s foundation is the page, which begins as an empty work surface, and you create your drawing by putting objects on that page. In contrast to Writer (a paragraph-based word processer) and Calc (a cell-oriented spreadsheet), Draw’s empty page offers more freedom. Draw’s objects are vector graphics, which use lines and curves defined by mathematical vectors. Vectors describe lines, ellipses, and polygons based on their geometry. Vector graphics allow you to stretch, turn, or scale your Draw objects without loss of information. All objects have individual properties. To manipulate an object’s property, you first have to create and place the object within the page’s…

Base is the relational database for the LibreOffice suite. A database is a tool that organizes data into a structured and easily accessible form. You might be thinking “I thought that what the LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet does,” and, if so, you would be correct. A database and a spreadsheet both store data in a structured form. A spreadsheet is more useful for some kinds of problems, such as a financial ledger. A database, on the other hand, is designed for easy search and data entry, and it scales more easily to larger datasets. A database is meant for situations where the user has a collection of discrete data objects or records with similar attributes. The classic example is something like a library card catalog – a series of similar items…

Formulas and Formats

The Math formula editor works either as a standalone program or from the other LibreOffice modules and embeds perfectly formatted formulas into text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and drawings. Math can represent fractions, powers, integrals, functions, and even whole systems of equations or matrices. To start Math in a separate window, click File | New | Formula. To include a formula in Writer, Calc, Impress, or Draw, select Insert | Object | Formula. The formula becomes an embedded object in the document that you can drag and drop and scale up or down. Working with the three-pane Math editor is the same in either case. On the left is a sidebar and at the bottom right a Commands pane, which is normally docked but can be separated and re-docked by pressing…

Formulas and Formats

Customizing LibreOffice

Extensions are unofficial add-ons to the basic Libre-Office office suite. Some make extra resources available, such as images for the Gallery or dictionaries for different languages. Others offer alternative dialog windows with additional features or different layouts, such as an alternative spellchecker or grammar checker. A few even offer new features that will eventually become part of the standard installation. Just as with Mozilla Firefox or Gimp, extensions are a major reason for LibreOffice’s popularity. Today, over 350 extensions exist. Some extensions are a collection of resources, such as replacement icons. Others are macros written in LibreOffice’s Basic scripting language or in standard programming languages such as Java – and, increasingly these days, Python. This versatility means that developers can begin to contribute to LibreOffice without familiarizing themselves with the…

Customizing LibreOffice

Formatting documents is time-consuming. Even if you use styles, formatting can still take a lot of effort – effort that can be better spent developing content. In addition, if more than one person is working on a series of documents, you do not want everyone to do their own formatting with inevitably inconsistent results. The solution to both these problems is templates – special files for storing both structure and content for easy reuse. Used with styles, a well-designed template can save time and remain useful for years. LibreOffice handles templates differently from other documents. To start with, you can tell a template from another LibreOffice file, because the second letter of its extension is always a t. For example, a Writer template has an. ott extension rather than…

All great software programs, especially free and open source software, share one common feature: You can easily customize and extend the software as you wish. The LibreOffice productivity suite is no exception, thanks to its support for those “saved sequence[s] of commands or keystrokes that are stored for later use” [1], otherwise known as macros. I like to think of macros as the LibreOffice equivalent of Unix scripts: Whether they are keyboard sequences or code written in a programming language, these simple programs may be created quickly, possibly with very little programming skill, to automate all sorts of tasks. ScriptForge [2], a LibreOffice library for building scripts, along with the APSO extension needed to run ScriptForge, provides a great tool to learn how to automate LibreOffice because it solves a…

Plotting and Data Visualization

Modern life is full of numbers. Even if one is not a mathematician, sooner or later comes the day when it’s necessary to quickly understand or share with others the relationships among numbers. This tutorial introduces what is probably the simplest way to do just that with free software, the charts in LibreOffice Calc [1]. But are they charts or graphs? Let’s clear up that question first. CHARTS VS. GRAPHS Both charts and graphs are tools to summarize and present information in a visual way. While most people use the two terms as if they were synonyms, strictly speaking, they aren’t [2]. Some of the reasons are shown in Figure 1, but basically charts summarize datasets in ways that are (hopefully) intuitive and engaging, for example, with bars, pies, or…

Plotting and Data Visualization

The Power of the Pivot

Almost everyone today works with spreadsheets from time to time. While most users are familiar with spreadsheet formulas, not everyone is familiar with another power feature, the pivot table. In this article, I show what a pivot table looks like in LibreOffice Calc and then explain what they do. Even if you are just a basic spreadsheet user, you won’t regret learning about pivot tables. A pivot table lets you automatically process the raw data from a spreadsheet (or part of it). It groups all the data in one column according to the values in another column or columns and then makes a calculation on each group and presents the data in the most compact way possible. As an example, take the simple spreadsheet in Figure 1; it has three…

The Power of the Pivot

Productivity Boost

Throughout this issue, we’ve looked at the various LibreOffice components and how to use them effectively. An office suite is a complex beast, and there are plenty of extra nooks and crannies to explore. (After all, LibreOffice is made up of 7 million lines of source code!) In this article, I’ll delve further into some lesser-known features and provide some tips to get more out of the LibreOffice suite. CONVERTING SLIDE ASPECT RATIOS The majority of modern computer screens and projectors use the 16:9 aspect ratio instead of the old 4:3 aspect ratio. The result is that many people have a large number of slide decks based on the 4:3 aspect ratio which must be converted to the new 16:9 version. If you use LibreOffice Impress correctly – meaning that…

Productivity Boost

If you’ve been following the development of LibreOffice since it was forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010, you’ll know that a great deal of effort has been put into cleaning up the source code. This has made the suite easier to compile, and, more importantly, it’s easier for new contributors to get involved. Along the way, new features have been added and Microsoft Office compatibility has been improved, but by and large, the look and feel haven’t changed very much over the years. That’s a good thing, of course – office suite users tend to value consistency and stability rather than shiny new widgets with every release. But there are some changes and new features that could really take LibreOffice up a level. Although they aren’t always available out of the…

Two decades ago, open source fonts barely existed, and the necessary licenses simply did not exist. That changed with the introduction of the SIL Open Font License [1] and the GPL font exception clause [2] as font designers, like programmers before them, showed themselves perfectly willing to release their work under free licenses. Today, thousands of open source fonts exist, many of them rivaling the best proprietary fonts. The best-known open source fonts are a standard part of many distributions’ default installations. But how to choose between so many options? Here is a summary of some of the most widely available free fonts, and how to choose between them. When some users think of fonts, they usually think of novelty fonts – flashy, exotic fonts used for short bursts of…

The Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) is the native format used for Libre-Office word processing files, spreadsheets, charts, and presentations. OpenDocument is an open format developed as a standard for office applications. OpenDocument was released by a Technical Committee (TC) at the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium in 2005 and approved as an ISO/IEC International Standard in 2006 as ISO/IEC 26300:2006. At the time OpenDocument was developed, the most popular format for office documents was the MS Office format set. At the time, the MS formats were closed and proprietary, yet these formats were so common that they became a pseudo-standard for saving, sharing, and transmitting document files. (See the box entitled “Standards and Pseudo-Standards.”) The widespread use of these proprietary file formats…

Secure Documents

A digital signature verifies a document’s trustworthiness. It guarantees that the sender is who they claim to be, and that the document has not been edited since it was signed. Ordinary file sharing may not require one, but if privacy is important – particularly in business or when financial matters are discussed – then a digital signature is one of the main ways to safeguard a file’s contents. Originally, a digital signature was created by a third-party certificate manager, which offered a certificate guaranteeing the document’s integrity. LibreOffice continues to refer to digital signatures, but, somewhat confusingly, uses the same term to refer to a GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) key that serves the same purpose. GPG [1] is a cross-platform method of encryption that can be installed on Linux, macOS,…

Secure Documents

Years ago, Elizabeth Mathias, an employee of Sun Microsystems, told me a story about StarOffice, the proprietary program that became OpenOffice.org, and later LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice. According to Mathias, when the Writer module was first developed several decades ago, its programmers were told they would have to use it to document their work. As a result, they made sure that Writer was not simply a word processor, but a layout program as well – to the benefit of free software users everywhere. In fact, although not complete, Writer’s features are advanced enough that it should hardly be considered a word processor at all. Admittedly, the features of Writer often go unnoticed. If you format manually, you might be completely unaware of them. Even if you use styles, you might…

LibreOffice is a worldwide project. Many of LibreOffice’s features are implemented by certified developers who are working in the LibreOffice ecosystem – such as Collabora, allotropia, CIB, and Red Hat. These companies use and make products based on LibreOffice and offer long-term support versions of the suite. When these companies make improvements to LibreOffice, they also contribute their changes to the community, thanks to the open source license. While much of the programming “grunt work” is done by these developers, there are also hundreds of people in the wider community who work on other aspects: localization (translating the user interface), design, marketing, documentation, handling bug reports, and much more. Everyone is welcome to get involved with the community (more on that later) and help to improve LibreOffice – meeting new…

Linux New Media is the voice of open source. Our magazines, newsletters, and websites explore the universe of free software for readers around the world. If you have an idea for an article on how to do something practical with an open source tool or system, we want to hear from you. Contact us at: edit@linuxnewmedia.com DISCLAIMER All brand or product names are trademarks of their respective owners. Contact us if we haven’t credited your copyright; we will always correct any oversight.…

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