This is just a thank you to the volunteers and others

English
#1

Subject: A thank you from an 85-year-old journalist (and a 20-year-old problem solved)

Hello everyone,

I wanted to drop in and share a success story, mostly just to say a profound thank you to the volunteers and developers who keep LibreOffice running.

I am 85 years old. I have been working as a journalist since 1980 and have never taken a computer science course.

For the last twenty years, I have had a problem that has dogged me: a folder full of old Microsoft Publisher (.pub) files that became completely inaccessible to me when I switched from Windows to a Mac. I had assumed they were just stranded forever.

Last night, I decided to try a new AI assistant, Manus, and simply asked it what my options were. It walked me through everything patiently and clearly, and pointed me straight to LibreOffice. When I told Manus I was on a Mac and that I had over 700 of these files, it gave me a single line of code to paste into the Mac Terminal.

The Terminal was scary! It looked intimidating, and I honestly planned to just look at it and tackle the actual work the next day when I was fresh.

But I pasted the command in anyway, just to see what would happen.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. In what felt like just a couple of minutes, the Terminal window scrolled away, and LibreOffice silently converted all 700 of my .pub files into perfect PDFs, right there in the folder. It just plain worked.

I was floating over the moon. Our astronauts today have nothing on the way I felt in that moment!

I made a donation to the project straight away, which feels like a bargain for getting 700 files back. To everyone who builds, maintains, and supports this software: thank you. You made an 85-year-old writer very, very happy. I am still in shock that it was so easy and simply WORKED.

— Mitzi. MitziPerdue.com

2 Likes
#5

Nice to hear. But a general hint: Keep also your old .pub-files, just in case you find out of something omitted later.
For files with simple/consistent structure this is unlikely, but keep backups is always a good habit.

Also for this:

  • Keep backups outside reach of any commands (not connected to your computer).
  • Try to read the commands before you paste. If in doubt ask somebody, what the command does.

AI is not at all beyond making errors and there are enough stories out there of users who deleted or published data.
A convert-to comnand for LibreOffice is usually quite safe, but command -line can handle a lot of data in short time, as you have seen yourself. Don’t be afraid, but careful.

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#2

very trendy these days ; https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/thank-you-michael-stahl/13596/4

https://community.documentfoundation.org/t/from-the-machine-room-at-tdf-managing-donations/13363/9 :wink:

#3

@fpy OP is talking about Publisher documents, not EPub.

1 Like
#4

oops :woozy_face:

#6

The pedant pedanted :slight_smile:

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