Category: Apple iWork

LibreOffice new EPUB feature a step in the right direction

Posted on by timcdana in Apple iWork, File formats, LibreOffice

Modern technology has allowed the individual to share his ideas and stories more easily. It has also given people low-cost or free access to more books.

Readers can enjoy their favorite books on any device, and they can read them on the go. Literature students can start Hamlet on their tablets in their dorm rooms and continue reading it on their phones in between classes.

A computer engineer, at his first job after graduation, can read “The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary” during lunch breaks on his laptop and continue reading on his phone during the train ride home.

Ebooks have changed how humans interact with books. They have been around for decades, but they became popular when Amazon released the Kindle in 2007 and Kindle apps in 2009. Barnes & Nobles, Kobo, and others released e-readers later.

New file formats, designed for e-books, were created at about the same time as these devices were released. One of the most widely used formats for e-books is EPUB (Electronic Publishing). Many e-book stores accept publications directly in this format, or they will convert the submissions to a proprietary format based on EPUB. Amazon uses a file format that is similar to EPUB, and will accept author submissions in the format.

Books are best converted from their original formats to EPUB through special software. Recently, several word processors have been released with basic export features to EPUB. LibreOffice Writer 6.0 has this as a new feature. Previous versions required an extension to be installed.

Another popular application, for Apple users, however does. Apple Pages allows users to export their documents to the EPUB format.

Microsoft Word 2016 does not have an EPUB export feature. However, Amazon has created a plugin for Word, so authors can format a book before submitting it to the Kindle store.

This article will give a brief overview of the format, then compare Writer and Pages capabilities of exporting to the format.

Continue reading “LibreOffice new EPUB feature a step in the right direction” →

Impress needs video export option

Posted on by timcdana in Apple iWork, File formats, LibreOffice, Microsoft Office

Videos are great ways to share ideas on the Web. Create one, upload it to your server or a video hosting service, like YouTube, and embed the video in a blog or other type of Web page.

NOTE: PowerPoint for Mac can export recorded slideshows to MP4 and MOV videos, but the audio may not be included in the video.

Turning a presentation into a video is a great way to share it, and if audio is included in the presentation, converting it into a video format is usually an effortless way of preserving the animation and audio of the original file. Currently, only Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows and Apple Keynote have easy ways to convert presentations to videos.

The current versions of LibreOffice Impress do not have this feature without adding a plugin. It has many of the same features as PowerPoint and several that the Microsoft application does not.

Continue reading “Impress needs video export option” →

LibreOffice Calc, Microsoft Excel bury insert rows and columns feature

Posted on by timcdana in Apple iWork, Google Drive, LibreOffice, Microsoft Office, spreadsheets

Spreadsheet applications are not used as much as word processors, but they are used for just as diverse purposes. Grocery shoppers can use them to create lists. Financial managers use them to create charts from data showing forecasts for organizations. There are many other users and uses.

Though people from diverse walks of life use spreadsheets differently, they all typically perform some of the same functions. These include adding and deleting columns and rows.

This article compares how these are done in LibreOffice Calc to how they are done in Microsoft Excel 2016 for Windows.

While these to spreadsheet applications are considered to be the most powerful and feature-rich applications. However, they are not as user-friendly as some other popular spreadsheets, when it comes to adding or deleting rows and columns.

First the article will explain how these are performed. Continue reading “LibreOffice Calc, Microsoft Excel bury insert rows and columns feature” →