Tabla de contenidos para Discover LibreOffice 2020 en Linux Magazine Special Editions

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:…

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 | Text 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. Toolbar: Most commonly used features are just one…

LibreOffice 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 borders.…

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,…

LibreOffice is a worldwide project. Many of the software’s features are implemented by certified developers [1] who are working in the LibreOffice ecosystem – such as Collabora, CIB, and Red Hat. These companies use and make products based on LibreOffice and offer long-term support versions of the suite. But when they make improvements to LibreOffice, they also contribute their changes back to the community, thanks to the open source license. While much of the “grunt work” programming 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 [2] with the community and help to improve LibreOffice – meeting new people…

Celia Palacios is active in the LibreOffice Documentation project. Here’s what she has to say about her experience. Tell us a bit about yourself! I am a Mexican old-guard user of Linux since 2001. I studied electronic engineering, and I have been working in that field since 1989. I learnt all sorts of Linux stuff because I love to learn by myself. In addition, I love to read historical detective novels, lots of science fiction, and go to the movies with my husband. I love philosophy, symbolism, and many alternative ideas about everything. I also like to have long, friendly debates about everybody’s presumptions (or assumptions?). I try to be open-minded, specially in these times when everyone’s getting polarized in Mexico about our President. I used to be an athletic…

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 Linux for deb systems■ 64-bit Linux for RPM systems Installation packages for the latest version are included in separate files/directories. 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■ Extensions – the top 20 LibreOffice extensions available online,…

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 Libre-Office 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…

In skilled hands, the LibreOffice Basic scripting language can do wonders, but you don’t have to be a programming expert to write simple, or even more advanced, macros that perform useful tasks. Whether you are a Linux home user or an IT specialist, you can use the built-in scripting powers of the LibreOffice suite to automate recurring tasks. This article provides some examples you can use as building blocks for your own LibreOffice coding projects. LOOKING UP WORDS The LibreOffice Basic macro editor is reachable through Tools | Macros | Edit Macros (Figure 1). Traditionally, an introduction to a programming language starts with a simple example that displays the “Hello world!” message. Although it’s cute, it’s not particularly useful, so instead, I’ll start with something more practical: a simple macro…

Imagine that you held a talk at your company’s recycling event last year, and you created a presentation and a hand-out to go with your talk – full of references to the old year 2018 and the new year 2019. Now you’re asked to do it again, so you launch LibreOffice, open the old documents – you want to reuse many of the slides – and start searching and replacing. Want to skip the manual work? This article shows you how to do it. Granted, there is a learning curve. I will be talking about XML, Bash, and Python – three possibly new languages (one for data, two for code). At the end, you will be able to search, analyze, and modify LibreOffice files automatically. For example, Figure 1 shows…

LibreOffice is community-driven and developed software that is a project of the nonprofit organization, The Document Foundation (TDF). LibreOffice is developed by users who believe in the principles of free and open source software and in sharing their work with the world in nonrestrictive ways. At the core of these principles are the four essential freedoms and the tenets of TDF’s Next Decade Manifesto [1] to which the community commits itself: ■ To eliminate the digital divide in society by giving everyone access to office productivity tools free of charge to enable them to participate as full citizens in the 21st century■ To support the preservation of mother tongues by encouraging people to translate, document, support, and promote our office productivity tools in their mother tongue■ To allowing users of…

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 1,024 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…

You can use Impress to create a photo album from a set of images, usually with one photo per slide. This photo album can use multimedia sources with graphics and images or even collect your latest holiday pictures into a single presentation file. To do this, first open an existing or blank presentation, and then choose Insert | Media | Photo Album. In the Create Photo Album dialog box that appears, click Add to select your images and browse your filesystem. Exactly how you select multiple images depends on your operating system, but usually you can do it by holding the Shift or Ctrl keys while clicking. After you’ve chosen your images, Impress offers some extra options (see Figure 2). One of the most important is Link images, which means…

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…

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…

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…

Something else worth keeping an eye on is LibreOffice Online (see Figure 5). As the name suggests, this is a version of the suite that can run inside a web browser, with the content being served over the network. LibreOffice Online has been in development for a few years, but has recently made major strides forward thanks to Collabora, which specializes in long-term supported versions of the suite (e.g., for government and enterprise usage). Currently, LibreOffice Online looks and feels very much like the desktop version of the suite, but not every single menu item or feature is available – it’s a bit trimmed-down in some respects. But it’s making rapid progress, largely because of Collabora. Because it uses the same underlying document layout engine as desktop LibreOffice, Open Document…

Jwtiyar Ali helps with localizing LibreOffice into Kurdish. TDF asked him about his experiences. To start with, tell us a bit about yourself! Hey! I live in the Kurdistan region, in the north of Iraq – the city of Sulaymaniyah. I have an MSc in Physics, but I love computer science too. Currently I am working in the Cement Quality Control Department at a cement factory, as a physicist. I do translations for many open source projects such as Ubuntu, Gimp, Firefox, etc., leading these translation projects. My hobbies are following new open source projects and seeing how they can be more competitive. I also like football, walking, and reading Python programming courses in my free time. What are the opportunities and challenges for promoting/using free software and LibreOffice in…