The Styles Menu and UI Customization

Yesterday I was reviewing a nice feature implemented by the User Experience Team of LibreOffice about the Style menu in WRITER. Like all help pages I review, I must test and explore the feature, looking to get the benefits but also to note the possible pitfalls.

What caught my attention was a nice combination of LibreOffice UI and menu customization. LibreOffice allows documents to carry the customized user interface menus, toolbars and much more. If you have a document that requires a specific set of commands you can customize the user interface in Tools - Customize and store the user interface in your document. When opening the document in another machine with LibreOffice, the user interface carried by the document is displayed. I used this feature professionally when I had to convert some old Excel macros to LibreOffice and the macros had hundreds of lines just to modify the user interface. I drop these lines, did the changes in UI once and stored in the document.

So I applied the same strategy to the Styles menu. I was glad to see that you can format your document with little amount click or by activating the style menu with the keyboard. All my custom style were in the menu.

Then closed my document and opened a new document. I wanted to apply my custom styles as before but hey... it does not work. The custom styles were just doing nothing.

The trick is to customize the Styles menu with your preferred styles and add them to your document instead of the LibreOffice Writer interface (the default). This detail slipped under my nose.

Lessons learned: If you want a document with custom styles in the Styles menu, create a template with your custom styles and custom user interface and each new document based on the template will have everything set up.

Happy Text Styling !

LibreOffice Basic well hidden secrets

Last week I wrote a quite long help page on a poorly known feature of LibreOffice aimed to Basic macro programmers.

LibreOffice - since it was named OpenOffice.org long time ago - carried a set of Basic libraries with no documentation (that I was able to find). The libraries were created to support some important features such as Euro conversion or WikiEditor, but also had a set of modules and macro very handy for the ad-hoc or professional Basic programmer of LibreOffice.

The library is distributed in the LibreOffice installers and can be opened in the LibreOffice Macros container, accessible when opening the Basic IDE.

I got fond of the TOOLS library because it has many handy macros that otherwise requires quite a lot of hard code writing and LibreOffice API knowledge even for simple operations.

Things like getting the last used row in a spreadsheet, get the value of a cell, get the filename out of a long URI are the kind of Function's and Sub's we don't want to write again but use GetLastUsedRow, GetValueofCellbyName or FileNameoutofPath for the task.

To use the LibreOffice Tools library , add the statement

GlobalScope.BasicLibraries.LoadLibrary("Tools")

before the first macro of your module. The help page is already online in 

https://help.libreoffice.org/6.1/en-US/text/sbasic/shared/03/lib_tools.html

Note that not every library is described in details in the set of Help pages but if you feel motivated to peek in the code and write a simple description of the remaining modules and macros, join our documentation team!

Happy macro programming!