Office Archive

The percent sign

Thom Holwerda 2015-03-18 Office 6 Comments

Since then the â€˜%’ has gone from strength to strength, and today we revel in a whole family of â€œper â€”â€”â€”â€”â€ signs, with â€˜%’ joined by â€˜â€°’ (â€œper milleâ€, or per thousand) and â€˜â€±’ (per ten thousand). All very logical, on the face of it, and all based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the percent sign came to be. Nina and I can comfort ourselves that we are not the first people, and likely will not be the last, to have made the same mistake.

I love stories like this. The history of our punctuation marks and symbols is often quite fascinating.

LibreOffice 4.4 released

Thom Holwerda 2015-01-30 Office 36 Comments

The highlight of the new release is a far-reaching visual refresh, with menus, toolbars, status bars, and more being updated to look and work better. While LibreOffice retains the traditional menus-and-toolbars approach that Microsoft abandoned in Office 2007, the new version is meant to make those menus and toolbars easier to navigate.

What are the reasons to use either OpenOffice or LibeOffice?

The death of the Urdu script

Thom Holwerda 2014-06-25 Office 36 Comments

Way back in 2009, I wrote about a few specific cases in which computers led to (subtle) changes in the Dutch language. While the changes highlighted in that article were subtle and not particularly substantial, there are cases around the world where computing threatens much more than a few subtle, barely noticeable features of a language.

This article is a bit too politicised for my taste, but if you set that aside and focus on its linguistic and technological aspects, it's quite, quite fascinating.

Urdu is traditionally written in a Perso-Arabic script called nastaliq, a flowy and ornate and hanging script. But when rendered on the web and on smartphones and the entire gamut of digital devices at our disposal, Urdu is getting depicted in naskh, an angular and rather stodgy script that comes from Arabic. And those that don’t like it can go write in Western letters.

It'd be fantastic if Microsoft, Google, and Apple could include proper support for nastaliq into their products. It's one thing to see Dutch embrace a new method of displaying direct quotes under the influences of computers, but to see an entire form of script threatened is another.

Goodbye, Lotus 1-2-3

Thom Holwerda 2013-05-21 Office 29 Comments

"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.

LibreOffice 4.0 released

Thom Holwerda 2013-02-07 Office 46 Comments

"The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.0, the free office suite the community has been dreaming of since 2001. LibreOffice 4.0 is the first release that reflects the objectives set by the community at the time of the announcement, in September 2010: a cleaner and leaner code base, an improved set of features, better interoperability, and a more diverse and inclusive ecosystem."

Guest post by the_randymon 2013-01-10 Office 40 Comments

For years, developers decried the tight fist Sun kept on the development of its office suite, preventing the hacker culture from improving its software. So now that LibreOffice is, well, free, it's not surprising to see one ambitious hacker has developed a mechanism for theming it. Let's have a round of applause for Jan Holesovsky, whose patch in the upcoming 4.0 edition of LibreOffice allows you to style LibreOffice using FireFox Personae. Holesovsky's blog is full of other interesting UI changes made to LibreOffice, proof perhaps that letting hackers hack is the best way to keep your project improving.

Using the new Office with touch

Thom Holwerda 2012-07-18 Office 19 Comments

"On Monday in San Francisco we took the wraps off of the new Office's touch experience designed for Windows 8. We showed the new touch-optimized Windows 8-style app for OneNote, and we showed how we've touch-enabled Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and other apps on the desktop. The new Office is designed for a great experience whether you're sitting on a couch with a tablet, or at a desk with a mouse and keyboard. It makes common tasks fast, fluid, and intuitive, while still enabling the rich capabilities required to create high-quality documents. In this post I'll walk you through the thinking, engineering process and design framework we used to reimagine these experiences for touch."

Microsoft OneNote MX preview: the first Metro Office application

Thom Holwerda 2012-07-18 Office 13 Comments

So, Office 2013 is a desktop application with a new look (which I personally happen to like, ridiculous 'streaming' installation notwithstanding). Then there's OneNote MX - the first Metro Office application. It uses a rather interesting contextual radial menu to get things done - quite fascinating. It's in the Windows Store starting now. I've been playing with it for a bit, and I must say, there's a huge chance I'll be writing my OSNews articles in OneNote MX from now on; the ability to have multiple different text areas and pictures like in a real-world note/clipbook is very, very useful. Nice that it syncs across devices, too. Be sure to take a look - this is an indication of a possible future Metro Office.

Office 2013 consumer preview released

Thom Holwerda 2012-07-16 Office 39 Comments

Microsoft has released a consumer preview for Office 2013. Highlighting the age-old internal tug-of-war between the Office and Windows divisions within Microsoft, it's just a desktop application, no Metro, and the only nod to that whole touch/tablet-thing is a special mode that does very little. So, Windows 8 is just around the corner, and still not a single serious Metro application. Not even Microsoft's own flagship suite - heck, not even a single application within that suite - could be adapted to Metro in time. Serious vote of confidence from the Office division there.

Submitted by Francis 2012-05-08 Office 15 Comments

"The Apache OpenOffice Project today announced the availability of Apache OpenOffice 3.4, the first release of OpenOffice under the governance of the Apache Software Foundation." I don't think OpenOffice could have ended up in a better foster home.

How to remain safe on the road

Dedoimedo 2012-04-02 Office 32 Comments

You have just bought tickets to an exotic vacation spot. You board the flight, you land safely, you pull your netbook from your backpack, fire it up, and then check if there are any available Wireless networks. Indeed there are, unencrypted, passwordless, waiting for you. So you connect to the most convenient hotspot and start surfing. Being addicted as you are, you want to login into your email or social network just to check if something cardinal happened in the world during your four-hour flight. You're about to hit the sign in button. Stop. What you're about to do might not be safe.

Bill Joy’s Greatest Gift to Man: the vi Editor

David Adams 2012-01-09 Office 13 Comments

In an enlightening article about the origin of the venerable vi text editor, Bill Joy reminds us that its quirks and qualities are all about the computing reality back in the 1970s: "you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade."

Submitted by judgen 2011-10-14 Office 41 Comments

"The LibreOffice media team has passed along some new information about what was revealed at this week's LibreOffice conference. At the Paris conference, experimental versions of LibreOffice for iOS, Android, and for web-browsers were revealed."

Guest post by lemur2 2011-08-08 Office 57 Comments

The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced the release of version 3.4.2 of the open source LibreOffice office suite. According to TDF Steering Committee member Italo Vignoli, the third release in the 3.4.x branch of LibreOffice is now ready for both individuals and enterprises, and can be used for production.

Guest post by lemur2 2011-06-22 Office 88 Comments

The Calligra Office Suite has announced its second snapshot release. The project, which is a fork of KOffice, is building a suite of productivity and creativity applications and is working towards its first formal end-user release due in October. The project is seeking feedback from end users particularly in the area of usability of the GUI. With this snapshot Calligra Office Words is claiming better compatibility with .docx than LibreOffice, and also claims to be approaching the best compatibility with legacy .doc formats.

Rock, Paper, Community: Oracle Gives up on OpenOffice

Thom Holwerda 2011-04-18 Office 120 Comments

Over the weekend, Oracle basically announced its defeat in the competition with the community-created fork of OpenOffice, LibreOffice. Oracle will cease all commercial development of OpenOffice, and will turn it into a purely community-based project.

The Document Foundation Launches LibreOffice 3.3

Kroc 2011-01-25 Office 7 Comments

"The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project."

Submitted by lemur2 2010-12-08 Office 3 Comments

The Document Foundation has announced that the software development project recently announced by BrOffice will contribute to the development of LibreOffice and other free software projects. BrOffice has 15 million users in Brazil.

LibreOffice: “It Is Wrong to Blame Oracle”

Submitted by suka 2010-11-16 Office 8 Comments

In a recent interview with derStandard.at Novell developer Michael Meeks talks about the reasoning behind the fork from OpenOffice.org, the first few weeks of the new project, and plans for the future.

33 Developers Leave OpenOffice.org

Guest post by Debjit 2010-11-01 Office 29 Comments

"We all knew that it would come to this and it has finally happened - 33 developers have left OpenOffice.org to join The Documents Foundation, with more expected to leave in the next few days. After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice.org fell into the hands of Oracle, as did a lot of other products. So, last month a few very prominent members of the OpenOffice.org community decided to form The Documents Foundation and fork OpenOffice.org as LibreOffice, possibly fearing that it could go the OpenSolaris way."