Wednesday, September 9, 2026

LibreOffice Calc now supports general Dynamic arrays features

If you don't know what is dynamic arrays, then just read this article https://exceljet.net/articles/dynamic-array-formulas-in-excel.

Note, dynamic array's functions like UNIQUE, FILTER, SORT, etc. were already implemented early. But other new general dynamic array features were added to LibreOffice Calc only now into current master that will be 27.2 release in next year.

Let's say big thanks to Collabora's developers for it, because all work was made for Collabora Office and then Xisco Fauli copied all patches to LibreOffice project (The source code license allows it, because it's the same MPL 2.0 on both sides).

You can try the new features using master daily builds for your OS by the link.

Monday, August 26, 2024

The best LibreOffice extensions. Code Highlighter 2

When I translated one book about Python to Russian which contained many examples of Python code I though quite long how to highlight them in the normal text. For book writing I used LibreOffice Writer (of course) but Writer has no a standard tool for code highlighting.

So after some searching I found the LibreOffice extension - Code Highlighter 2. It is also available on our extension site. This extension makes code highlighting using Pygments Python library. There is support for many programming languages and many color styles for highlighting there.

The extension worked fine, but I didn't like that for highlighting I should manually select every code example in the text, then press some shortcut, then select another code example, etc...

I wrote an issue on the extension github page and after some discussions the extension author Jean-Marc Zambon implemented a new feature that allows to highlight all code example in the book in only one action using Paragraph style!

So my workflow in this case will be as follows:

  • Create a snippet for the AutoText with code example that has a special paragraph style (for example, with font name Consolas and font size 12pt) with name, for example too - 'Python_code'.
  • Use this snippet to insert code examples
  • In the end of book writing just use the new feature in the extension and highlight all code examples in only one action!

 


Above you can see examples of the Code Highlighter work with some light and some dark styles.