Introducing the Year Book Template

[Gizmo2007]

The Year Book Writer template is something that I initially created for my own personal use as an aid for writing and keeping several diaries, some of which are for cooking, gardening and reading. I also keep a plain old yearly diary and journal. But it quickly expanded from a simple diary into a single document that consolidated the equivalent of several functional pieces of day-to-day useful software, things like: a Diary, Day Planner – Scheduler, Calendar Software, Day Tracking, Reminders, To Do Lists and Monthly Expenses. Essentially, it became the one place to keep and organize all the most important information about my life spread over any given year. Hence the term Year Book.

I’m getting rather old now and I would like to donate the Year Book template to LibreOffice, assuming that they think it may be of use to others. I tried to find some other way to contract LO about this, but failed, so that’s why I’m writing this here.

The best way for anyone at LO to determine whether Year Book would be of use to LO’s many users, would be to examine what it can do. So with that in mind I put together a manual. It can be viewed and downloaded here as a PDF:

Year Book Manaul 2022.pdf

My apologies if this is not the correct forum to try to make this donation.

[ajlittoz]

Out of pure curiosity: your template seems to be a store of numerous macros. One of my mania is styles. Is the resultant document formatted with styles (thus allowing easy customisation) or with **direct formatting (needing a revision of all macros for customisation)?

[Gizmo2007]

Yes, there are a lot of macros in this template. But the macros are divided into separate modules so that if a user chooses not to have support for say Monthly Expenses, then that module is not included in the Writer file created for the user. (The same applies for the Day Planner.)
If you look at the manual you’ll see that there are many custom styles applied to many of the various features of Year Book. (It’s nice to be able to make changes in the styles themselves to make your diary document your own.) Having sad that, there were some limitations to this especially in regard to text tables. Year Book uses text tables for the Day Planner and the Monthly Expenses. But styles are limited for text tables ( or so I have found.) For example, I alternate the background colors of the rows in these tables, but I could not find a way to do this with a style. So I used Const Long values at the top of the Module to set those colors. These can be altered by a user if he wanted to, I suppose.

As I said in my first post, I’m getting old. I use the diaries I create with Year Book every single day.I just thought that maybe LO would like to take over Year Book if there appeared to be enough enthusiasm from its many users to actually use it. I’ve put a lot of thought, work and effort into this. I think many users would find it useful. If I die anytime soon, then Year Book dies too. That’s not the end of the world by any means, just the end of Year Book. (And of course, me )

[ajlittoz]

I have no idea about the procedure of submitting a template for inclusion on the extensions site. All I found is Using this site as an extension maintainer » Extensions
It looks like the credentials for AskLO also allow you to upload an extension/template.

[Gizmo2007]

Thanks for all your help on this. I’ll check out the info you’ve provided.
If I can find the time, and the energy, I might try my hand at creating a blog for Year Book. But that would require a lot more work and still wouldn’t solve the problem of what happens once I’m gone. Oh well.
Thanks again.