Instead of printing your drafts and marking them up with a red pen, LibreOffice allows you to implement an all electronic workflow, and save comments and edits as part of the document history.  In this tutorial you will learn how to use the tools that LibreOffice provides to track the changes you make to your documents, and provide your reviewers with the ability to reject or accept changes.  Even though this is a process that I find is often overlooked, it is extremely simple to implement, and can make you vastly more productive.

I hope you find this tutorial helpful, and as always, I welcome your feedback!

What separates a good report from a bad one is not always the content.  If you find it a struggle to clearly communicate the meaning of your data, try to add some color.  People are busy, and who wants to spend valuable time deciphering a complicated report?  Use color to establish relationships between numbers, highlight what is important, or create a consistent style. Experiment, and let me know how your creations turn out!

This episode originally included a part about basic color theory.  I cut that out in the interest of time, but if you are interested there are a lot of resources available online.  http://www.worqx.com/color/ is a good introduction.  Spending a little time to learn the basics of color theory can help you make more informed decisions about how you format documents, and why negative numbers are so often shown in red.

In this episode we take a look at how to perform a mail merge in LibreOffice.  A mail merge involves using a text document as a template, and “merging” it with records maintained in a database.  Usually this is done when personalizing mass mailings so that the recipient’s name and address appear in the document.  To make the exercise a little more interested, in this episode we use the mail merge capabilities of LibreOffice, and create a game of “Madlibs”.

In situations where you have hundreds of names and addresses that you want to send a letter to, or if you just want to print an address label for each of your contacts to attach to a party invitation, LibreOffice and mail merge can save you a lot of time by automating the process.  This might not be something you use everyday, but when you need it, you will be glad you know how to do it.

In this episode I show you how to import the most common image types (jpeg, png) into LibreOffice and arrange them in your documents to create visually striking layouts.  I also show you some of my favorite resources for finding images online which you can freely incorporate into your documents.

Show notes:

Open Clip Art (Images in the Public Domain)
Flickr Creative Commons (Images shared under various Creative Commons Licenses)

LibreOffice is a fork of the OpenOffice.org project, and is available for all major platforms including Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Like its predecessor, OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice is an open source office suite that emphasizes open document formats but is compatible with Microsoft Office. LibreOffice has received tremendous support from the community, and has seen widespread adoption by users of OpenOffice.org.

It originated in 2010 as a group of developers, under the name of the Document Foundation, who were not happy with Oracle’s stuardship of the OpenOffice.org project, forked the office suite and began development on LibreOffice in an effort to become independent of Oracle, and ensure that the project continues to be sustained as a community developed project. The Document Foundations hopes that one day Oracle will release the copyright to OpenOffice.org, and allow the Document Foundation to use the name. In the mean time a strong community of open source developers has put their efforts behind the LibreOffice project, and it has seen contributions from the like of Novell, Red Hat, and Canonical. LibreOffice has become a significant project, and in many ways has become the successor to OpenOffice.org.

In this episode I introduce you to LibreOffice, and show you how to install it on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The newest version of Ubuntu already comes with LibreOffice, but for those of you who are not using Ubuntu, or who prefer to use the more stable long term support version (LTS), I hope you find this tutorial useful.

If you have never heard of LibreOffice, or just want to take a peek at some of the differences between OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice, this episode will provide you with a high level overview of some of the features of LibreOffice. Before you know it, you will be recommending LibreOffice to your friends and coworkers as I have!

Show Notes:
Oracle Buys Sun
Oracle Kills OpenSolaris
Installing from PPA

Install Java on Ubuntu
Installing LibreOffice

If you are not used to using keyboard shortcuts, take it from me, they are worth the effort you put into learning them.  Start with the one you find most useful like “Control-A” to select all the cells in the spreadsheet.  Write it down on a piece of paper next to your computer and work it into your daily spreadsheet activities.  Before you know it, you can throw that piece of paper away and replace it with a new keyboard shortcut.

On a side note, this has been a very exciting episode for me to produce.  It is the first episode produced entirely using open source software.  This has been a goal of mine since I started this blog, and I look forward to continuing to use these tools to create more episodes.  Hopefully in the near future I will be able to produce some “behind the scenes” episodes on the open source tools I’ve used for creating these screencasts.

My personal favorite use of headers and footers is to include the file and path name of a document, that is to say, a description of where the file is saved on your hard drive.  I try to put this information on every document I print out.  Years from now when I come across something I printed from OpenOffice.org and wonder where it is saved on my computer, all I have to do is look at the file and path name which I usually include in the footer.  If you don’t want the world to know how you have your documents organized on your computer when they receive a document of your, then you can use a secret code or abbreviation that only you will understand to indicate where a document is saved. The idea is to use something that will remind you long after you have forgotten where you saved the document.

There are a lot of uses for headers and footers, and they are very easy to include in your documents.  This episode will show you how simple it is to create a header or footer in all your OpenOffice.org documents.

With formulas you will be able to add numbers together, calculate an average or determine if one value is larger than another.  For some, using formulas seems intimidating, but the truth is that the most useful formulas are quite easy to use.  Once you master the basics or formulas, you will be able to do some very powerful things with your spreadsheets.  I encourage you to spend the time necessary to learn how to use formulas.  Before you know it, you will be a spreadsheet master!

If you only ever use your home computer with OpenOffice.org installed, and don’t ever find a need to share documents with other friends or colleagues, you might not ever have had the need to use OpenOffice.org to perform file format conversions. At my day job they only use Microsoft Office, but I do not have access to the programs at home.  If I need to bring documents home to edit them, I am able to do so with OpenOffice.org.  This episode covers some of the basics of using OpenOffice.org to work with Microsoft Office documents.

I find keyboard shortcuts invaluable when using programs such as OpenOffice.org professionally.  In a normal work day, you will spend a significant portion of your time simply entering information into a document.  This process, normally called data entry, can be tedious and thoroughly not enjoyable. Keyboard shortcuts help you work faster and more efficiently by reducing the number of menus you have to navigate to complete a task, and they make the whole process less tedious.