Luke's LibreOffice Hacks

First let me give you a straight answer, unlike the (nonsense)-answer you will find on the LibreOffice Online Help pages.  Here is the original question as found on the LO Help Pages site 6 years ago (it appears that nothing has changed and nothing has been done about this "closed" issue since 2015). How to change background color of comment(ctrl+alt+c) & is there any other feature like comment that can be hide-unhide “on click”? I found in options, it allows to change the bright yellow color of notes in Spreadsheet. Which option do i use to change bright yellow color of comment in Impress? Straight-forward Answer :  Changing the background color of comment boxes in Writer and Impress cannot be done. Period.  Forget about all the LO Help replies that explain how each user of a shared document is assigned a different color for his/her comments; that has nothing to do with the simple question as originally stated. And  the suggestion that frames can be used to make remind

We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. If you don't care to read the background information and just want to skip straight to the solution, scroll down to the stuff with the yellow highlighting. Background : I convert a  lot of public domain books to text, edit them, add commentary, then convert them back to e-Book formats for reading on my computer, smartphone and other devices. I have a Google Pixel phone and am heavily invested in Google Play Books, so it is to my advantage to upload my converted and newly-created .epub and .pdf books to Google Play Books, for reading on my phone. The Problem: I completely ditched all things Microsoft several years ago. LibreOffice Writer is the only product I use for word processing, as it is far superior not only to other Linux offerings, it is way better than M

UPDATE : (10-30-2022) The method described under "CASE" below works with the older "Ubuntu Tweaks" but not the newer "Gnome Tweaks." Fortunately, you can accomplish the same objective by going to (System) Settings / Keyboard and in the "Compose Key" box select the key you want to use to invoke the typing of Special Characters. In my own case, I selected the Right-Alt key as I rarely used it for anything else. Now, if I want to enter a long-dash, for instance, I tap the right-alt key, followed by tapping the dash sign on the keyboard three times. A long dash — is entered, as opposed to the ugly three dashes --- you get if you don't use the Compose Key method.  The table below remains valid for this updated method. Once you get used to typing the correct key combinations, which is mainly an intuitive task, it is easy to enter all those special characters you occasionally need to use. ### (We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find help

(We recommend you bookmark this blog. Trying to find helpful information in forums usually just ends in making you frustrated and angry. This blog does not speculate or guess. If we post it, we've tried it and it works. As with all our posts, if you don't care about the background info, you can head straight to the yellow highlighted section for the problem and the fix.) I ditched Microsoft OS completely and forever and installed Ubuntu Linux on all my machines roughly eight years ago. During that time, I have installed every upgrade, which amounts to somewhere around sixteen, if you include version 21.04. I never had even a minor glitch on any of my machines until the very recent 21.04 upgrade attempted on an older Fujitsu laptop. Before you jump to any conclusions, not I did not try to force the upgrade by using the terminal. I waited for the "official" upgrade to show up in Software Updater, which happened only today because of some problem that occurred on someone

Our Standard Cautionary Tale on Forums There is a lot of useless junk in forums that purport to tell you how to fix the memory issues in LibreOffice. Most of them are useless because many of the fixes are based on old, outdated versions of LO, say, for instance, version 5.0 or lower. They are also useless because there is always a lot of speculation and guessing taking up space in a forum.  The fixes below cut through the useless junk, and they simply work. We assume that you are on an updated version of LO, such as 6.5 or higher, thus many of the improvements to memory settings are already baked into LO.  Skip the Details For those who don't need all the "what's" and "why's," skip to the highlighted fixes for items 5 and 6 below. Background In earlier versions (see above) of LibreOffice (nee, OpenOffice), memory settings caused the program to react slowly or not at all, depending on the task you were executing. Most of those freezes and crashes had to d

 Okay, so that's a really long title for a blog post, but sometimes you must use many words to explain what it really is that you are doing, a lesson learned by spending a lot of time on the mostly worthless forums where people have very little ability to form a subject line that has anything to do with their issue.  At any rate, some background. I love downloading public-domain (mostly) books and documents, but often they are scanned as image files. As I am a writer and want to use quotes from the pdf, it is much easier if I convert the picture pdf to a text pdf so I can copy and paste, rather than re-typing the  quoted material.  There are lots of ways to go about this conversion task, but often they require buying conversion software or paying to play in the cloud. I hate spending money on work stuff, so here's my simple, quick solution.  Install gscan2pdf. In Ubuntu, you can do that from the Ubuntu Software Centre or the Gnome Software Center. If you are into installing usi

Here at Luke's LO Hacks we love Okular , a free, open-source pdf program that is one of our main companion programs to LibreOffice Writer. It's great, but not perfect, which means from time to time we find either a glitch or have a suggestion for an improvement. In truth, glitches are few, but one significant glitch we discovered was the loss of bookmarks after renaming a pdf file that we bookmarked. Here's the sequence : Open pdf. Add bookmarks (in this case, quite a few). Save the file and close it. In Nautilus (file folders program for Ubuntu Linux), rename the file to append the word "Bookmarked." Re-open the file. Result : Bookmarks disappeared, had to re-bookmark everything. Bug Report : A bug report was submitted (Okular version 1.10.0).  WHAT YOU SHOULD DO: If you have experienced the same problem, make sure you re-name your file BEFORE adding bookmarks; and once you have added bookmarks, don't change the file name unless you don't mind re-bookmark