Dione Maddern and The Documentation Team are proud to announce the immediate availability of the LibreOffice Calc Guide 24.8, an update of the existing Calc Guide 24.2 with enhancements taken from the current LibreOffice 24.8 Calc module.

The book was reviewed for clarity, readability and content additions, notably the Calc database table referencing in formulas, removal of deprecated JavaScript debugger and refactoring of the Calc’s chart topic – in which the chapter on charts was split in two, one for the chart basics and the second for the chart types. Dione Maddern, Calc editor says:

I took on the challenge of compiling the Calc Guide because I wanted to learn about advanced editing and working with master documents. While I’ve previously worked on large documents in the engineering and insurance industries, documents were often compiled with clunky cut-and-paste techniques which created a lot of errors and labor-intensive rework. Working on the Calc Guide 24.8 was a great opportunity to expand my skills in LibreOffice and document production generally. It was also a wonderful opportunity to work with the LibreOffice Documentation Team. I had a great time working with such a fun and supportive team.

Special thanks to Ed Olson, Lisa Samy and Claire Wood for their review of the contents of the guide. And to B. Antonio F. for his throughout review of formatting the guide and by writing a set of macros, bundled in an LibreOffice extension that allows automatic and assisted fixing of images, tables , styles and more.

It was also a wonderful opportunity to work with the LibreOffice Documentation Team. I had a great time working with such a fun and supportive team. (Dione Maddern)

It has been an honor to share my wordsmithing skills with the LibreOffice documentation team. Replacing verbose paragraphs in the Calc guides with simplified, minimalist text has been both challenging and rewarding. I look forward to continuing my work on other applications in the suite as new releases become available. (Ed Olson)

Joining the Calc Guide team marked my first time contributing to an open-source platform. My time working with other team members was both enriching, yet eye-opening to all the facets of document editing. As such, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with the LibreOffice Community as a whole. (Lisa Samy)

I accepted the challenge of creating mechanisms to harmonize he appearance of chapter text according to the chapter template established by the documentation team. It was an opportunity to delve deeper into macro programming and get to know the LibreOffice API better. SanityCheck macros allow you to correct formatting errors (based on styles), correctly adjust images, tables, and automatically apply descriptions for accessibility. With SanityCheck you can check documentation chapters in English, Spanish and Portuguese. (B. Antonio F.)

I enjoyed working on the Calc Guide as it gave me the opportunity to work with a truly global team. The content also challenged my knowledge about spreadsheets. I was happy to develop my knowledge, getting new information …

Marcial Machado recently posted on Reddit about his “fully-featured LibreOffice Impress template for creating Jeopardy-style games. Just add your questions and categories, and you’re good to go!” So let’s find out more…

What does the template do?

At its core, the template is meant to emulate what a game of Jeopardy is like. You can click on any of the squares on the game board and it will send you to the slide with the associated question, where you can either return to the board in the case of a misclick, or reveal the answer to the question. Returning to the board from the revealed answer slide will erase the square you clicked on to clearly show which questions are left to be answered.

You can also use the green and red arrows at the top to give and remove points to up to 6 teams in increments of 100, in order to keep track of everyone’s correctly- and incorrectly-guessed answers. Once the board’s cleared, you can click the pink button at the bottom right to clearly display the top three teams and the points they earned. I made sure to include details on how to edit, and use, the template in the first two slides!

Why did you develop it?

The simple reason for why I developed this template was because: I use LibreOffice, I wanted a Jeopardy presentation that worked in LibreOffice, and I couldn’t find one. The more verbose reason is that there is a comparative dearth of visually-appealing presentation templates in the OPT world than there is in the PPTX world; this is no fault of the creators of OPT templates, but rather because the proprietary nature of something like PowerPoint incentivizes templates made for profit, whereas most people who create LibreOffice Impress templates do it out of interest.

This necessarily means that there are just less people making LibreOffice Impress templates in total, without mentioning the much smaller userbase LibreOffice has compared with Microsoft Office. Now, some PowerPoint files do work in Impress, and the work done by the dev team and contributors is commendable, but a converted document is still a converted document. Formatting might be slightly off, and macros are almost always a bust. Since I realized I wanted this Jeopardy project to exist, and realizing my own frustration with the fact that such a project didn’t exist already, I went ahead and tried it out myself, and then released it to the public!

Do you have any tips for other people interested in creating templates in LibreOffice?

I have a few:

• Focus on a problem you, yourself, have. You’ll be much more eager to bring a project to completion and to a high level of quality if you have a vetted interest in the final product.

• Tell yourself that no one, ever, is going to make what you want to be made. The problem with a community of like-minded contributors is that everyone thinks everyone …

2024 was a prolific year for the LibreOffice documentation.

With many guides updated and the application Help tracking closely the latest LibreOffice release, the team made all efforts to keep the pace of the development, bringing the new features to the public in the set of books, Help online and more.

To all the nice team, our Big Thank you!

Berlin, 19 December 2024 – LibreOffice 24.8.4, the fourth minor release of the LibreOffice 24.8 family of the free open source, volunteer-supported office suite for Windows (Intel, AMD and ARM), MacOS (Apple and Intel) and Linux, is available at www.libreoffice.org/download.

The release includes over 55 bug and regression fixes over LibreOffice 24.8.3 [1] to improve the stability and robustness of the software, as well as interoperability with legacy and proprietary document formats.

LibreOffice is the only office suite that respects the privacy of the user, ensuring that the user is able to decide if and with whom to share the content they create. It even allows deleting user related info from documents. As such, LibreOffice is the best option for the privacy-conscious office suite user, while offering a feature set comparable to the leading product on the market.

Also, LibreOffice offers a range of interface options to suit different user habits, from traditional to modern, and makes the most of different screen sizes by using all the space available on the desktop to put the maximum number of features just a click or two away.

The biggest advantage over competing products is the LibreOffice Technology engine, the single software platform on which desktop, mobile and cloud versions of LibreOffice – including those from ecosystem companies – are based.

This allows LibreOffice to produce identical and fully interoperable documents based on two ISO standards: the open and neutral Open Document Format (ODT, ODS, ODP) and the closed and fully proprietary Microsoft OOXML (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX), which hides a large amount of artificial complexity, and can cause problems for users who are confident that they are using a true open standard.

End users looking for support can download the LibreOffice 24.8 Getting Started, Writer, Impress, Draw and Math guides from the following link: books.libreoffice.org/. In addition, they can get first-level technical support from volunteers on mailing lists and the Ask LibreOffice website: ask.libreoffice.org.

LibreOffice for Enterprise

For enterprise-class deployments, TDF strongly recommends the LibreOffice Enterprise family of applications from ecosystem partners, with three or five year backporting of security patches, other dedicated value-added features and Service Level Agreements: www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.

Every line of code developed by ecosystem companies for enterprise customers is shared with the community on the master code repository and improves the LibreOffice Technology platform. Products based on LibreOffice Technology are available for all major desktop operating systems (Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS), mobile platforms (Android and iOS) and the cloud.

The Document Foundation’s migration protocol helps companies move from proprietary office suites to LibreOffice, by installing the LTS (long-term support) enterprise-optimised version of LibreOffice, plus consulting and training provided by certified professionals: www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/.

In fact, LibreOffice’s mature code base, rich feature set, strong support for open standards, excellent compatibility and LTS options make it the ideal solution for organisations looking to regain control of their data and break free from …

We’ve finished editing and uploading another batch of videos from our recent conference in Luxembourg. Now the playlist has a total of 51 videos and is almost entirely complete! (There are a couple more that we’re chasing up.)

So, enjoy watching and learning about the technology and community behind the suite. Use the icon in the top-right to choose videos from the playlist:

Our team member Peter Schofield just updated the Impress, Draw and Math guides to the latest LibreOffice 24.8 release.

The Impress, Draw and Math guides are the authoritative guides for the end user. They cover presentation, drawings and equation documents. These guides are part of the LibreOffice community offering for the public in general that needs to close the knowledge gap in using LibreOffice.

The guides can be downloaded from the LibreOffice Bookshelf as well as from the Documentation website.

A big thank you to dear Peter!