This weekend will mark my second year at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE).  Needless to say I’m excited!  Last year was a blast, and this year is sure to be even better.  SCALE is a great opportunity to learn new things, meet like-minded people, and walk away energized about …

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.

In this episode I show you how to take a dull report, and make it more visually appealing by adding color. Color helps us take a complicated subject, and make it easy to understand at a glace. The tools that LibreOffice provides are very powerful and allow you a great deal of flexibility when formatting your reports. Used in conjunction with clipart, the techniques you learn in this episode will help you take your reports to the next level.

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”.

Using images in your documents is a good way to ensure that they give a lasting impression. Whether it is a resume, letter, or flyer to promote an upcoming event, LibreOffice makes it easy to add images to your documents, and format them correctly. Traditionally office productivity suites like Microsoft Office have offered clip art which you can include with your documents. Unfortunately the clip art that usually comes with these office programs is less than desirable. By using LibreOffice, and other resources that are available for free online, you can add some visual impact to your documents.

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.

There has been a storm brewing in the OpenOffice.org world over the last few  months ever since Oracle acquired Sun.  Many software developers, unsure of what direction Oracle was going to take its newly acquired open source projects, have begun to look for alternatives to contribute to.  A group called the Document …

It becomes increasingly important to efficiently select the cells you are working with, in an OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet, as your spreadsheet gets bigger and bigger. Those of you who have worked with files that are thousands of rows long know what I mean. Learning a few simple keyboard shortcuts, will make your productivity increase tremendously! In this episode, we cover a few of the most useful shortcuts for selecting cells in an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet. Once you have the cells you want selected, you can use your selection to apply formatting to make your spreadsheet look nice, or use the values of your selection in calculating formulas.

Often when creating documents you will want to repeat a piece of text on each page you print out. Sometimes this means printing the title of the document on the top of each page, including the date a document was created on the bottom of each page, or printing the page number on each page individually so that they do not get accidentally placed out of order. OpenOffice.org makes creating such headers or footers a breeze. With a few simple clicks you will be able to include titles, dates, page numbers, or any other information in the headers or footers of all your documents.

This episode focuses on introducing the basic concepts of using formulas in OpenOffice.org’s Spreadsheet program, including using functions to add groups of numbers, calculate their average, and other basic mathematical operations.