Every year Google runs a Summer of Code (GSoC) and as with every year, The Document Foundation is one of the major participating open source organizations. From a total of 91 proposals, 11 have been accepted this year and we are happy to announce five projects that aim to improve usability.…
Author: Heiko Tietze
Our Happy Hour – How LibreOffice Sidebar Tenders Properties and Functions
In March 2016, we asked the community how they use the sidebar and how they feel it should evolve. About 290 participants answered the single choice questions and around 100 answered the free text question. All in all, users want as much freedom and flexibility as possible.…
Results from the Survey about LibreOffice Draw, Part 2: How LibreOffice Draw is expected to evolve.
In the first part of the survey results analysis, we showed how people use LibreOffice Draw. Those questions were of quantitative nature with an exact answer that easily can be summed up and averaged. In this second part, we are dealing with open ended answers that are more challenging in their evaluation.…
Results from the Survey about LibreOffice Draw, Part 1: How LibreOffice Draw is being utilized.
In February 2016, we asked the community for what purpose LibreOffice Draw is being used and in what direction it should evolve. The response to this survey was incredible, with more than 2,000 participants answering the questionnaire and almost 1,000 of them making detailed free text statements.…
What do you expect from the sidebar in Libreoffice?
With the release of LibreOffice 4.1, the Sidebar was introduced. It was originally developed for IBM Lotus Symphony, apparently as an alternative to the toolbar, however the usability foundation of this concept was not elaborated. The question “What is the sidebar good for” should be answered clearly in order not to overutilize or abuse this widget.…
What do you expect from Libreoffice Draw in the future?
Libreoffice promotes its graphic tool with the words:
‘Draw lets you produce anything from a quick sketch to a complex plan, and gives you the means to communicate with graphics and diagrams. Draw is a an excellent package for producing technical drawings, general posters, etc.…
Way Down In The Libreoffice Menus
Introduction
With the release of LibreOffice 4.4 last year, we began making incremental updates to the main menus, with the major overhaul happening in the upcoming 5.1 release. The work is guided by LibreOffice’s new Human Interface Guideline (HIG), which has given us the core framework, however some questions have arisen challenging the reasoning of our work.…
Area fill options made consistent
Introduction
As in many other dialogs, Libreoffice provides a lot of functionality for tweaking the hell out of areas taken up by shapes, charts, frames, etc. You can have a solid background color, with or without transparency/opacity, you may fill areas with gradients that in turn have several options, it can be assigned to hatchings, patterns and bitmaps, each with numerous options again, etc.…
Style your tables
Introduction
Tables are one the most frequently used objects in documents. If you want to present data in a structured way with, for instance, small gridlines, a nice header, right aligned numbers, and highlighted totals- that’s a table. And if you need a unique branding defined by your company or just want to have a consistent look and feel you have to apply all those formattings exactly for each table.…
LibreOffice Design Session: Inserting a Chart
Probably everyone working with Libreoffice Calc is using charts. And maybe some wondered why the dialog to insert a chart has a wizard-like workflow for all the less relevant options. But inserting a chart is not only a task in Calc.…