Michael Helfer and I today gave a short talk at the LibreOffice conference in Bern on our use of Open Source office software – i.e. LibreOffice – in combination with Open Source reference management software – that’s Zotero – in our Information Skills classes. The two points we meant to press to the audience of LibreOffice developers, were:

• Our students need LibreOffice for the iPad! and
• Drop the LibreOffice bibliographic tool, and replace it with Zotero.

On our first point, we had a speedy response: Cloudon have just completed development of an iOS app that allows creating and editing text, spreadsheet and presentation files, and is based on LibreOffice. (It’s readily downloadable from the App Store now.) A genuine LibreOffice version for Android is, we are told, in the pipeline for early next year, and an iOS one will follow some time later. For all those who may still be writing their thesis on a Mac or PC, but who wish to edit it on the go, this is good news; but also for LibreOffice itself which needs to catch up with competitors Microsoft Office and iWork.