LibreOffice Quantal features: Unity Integration, PackageKit and Templates

So the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Raring Ringtail (UDS-R) is starting tomorrow — although not exactly a slide-heavy conference, this is still an excellent opportunity to point out some of the new features available in LibreOffice 3.6.2 that comes with the just released Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal):

• first of all: all the nifty new upstream features like color scales, data bars, pdf watermarks, Office SmartArt import, Corel Draw import and much, much more …
• thanks to the awesome work of Antonio Fernandez of Aentos: unity menu integration making lo-menubar as a separate package obsolete
• PackageKit/Session Installer integration and a new package with a set of excellent templates by Alexander Wilms. There were even more high quality templates created by other contributors — I plan to add those with the next release.

The PackageKit/Session Installer integration is implemented in UNO, that allow extensions and macro creators to trigger the installation of software from trusted archives in general — quite a nifty feature in itself. As we have this now in place, in the future we can also use it to complete the LibreOffice install by adding missing packages for certain actions that are not available in the default Ubuntu installation (which leaves out some parts of LibreOffice).

For the next LibreOffice release, the template installer has to be adopted to the cool work of Rafael on the template dialog. I plan to upstream both the unity and the session installer integration for the next LibreOffice release.

This series of screenshots shows all of this in action:

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Installing the template pack from LibreOffice

Speakerdeck’d myself … (also: LibreOffice conference 2012)

You’re so vain, I’ll bet you think this song is about you.

— You’re so vain, Carly Simon

I just uploaded all my past and current slides to speakerdeck, for your pleasure and ridicule. From the just finished LibreOffice conference 2012 in Berlin, this now has:

• gerrit for LibreOffice (together with Robert and David)
• EasyHacks for Non-Developers
• Shamans and Canaries

The QA and RelEng roundtable had no slides and the same is essentially true for “LibreOffice Development Workshop” on Sunday at the UbuCon.
If you click through all the slidedecks, you will note that for the gerrit talk, I only fasttracked through the recycled “Crowdsourcing Reviews”-Talk from Paris, just to leave the stage for David and Robert to talk about the interesting and new stuff. They deserve all the credit really, as anyone having seen the talk or the stream can attest!

To the freshly volunteered canaries: I will send a you a mail on how to proceed soon, promised!

Finally, I have to highlight this awesome video by Cloph, which played right after the welcome talk. It shows how awesome, diverse and buzzing the LibreOffice community has become — One year of activity on the LibreOffice core repository: