Getting started with using Apache OpenOffice/LibreOffice Basic (Installing MRI)

Introduction:

While I think macros with spreadsheets are typically a bad idea, every once and a while you will find yourself writing one.  Either to format a big spreadsheet quickly, change calculations, or add a bit of magic to your spreadsheet.  However, one of the biggest downsides to using LibreOffice (LO) or Apache OpenOffice (AOO) is that the libraries included with these products are insanely more confusing to new users than say Microsoft's offering in their Office suite.  Especially true if you are coming from a hard core background in MS Office, say like a power user of Excel or Access.

There are a ton of projects that are on-going to make LO and AOO, which both use the Universal Network Objects (UNO) framework to provide pretty much all of the functionality within the multitude of components within those suites, slightly easier to deal with.  One of those is MRI which is a plug-in for LO and AOO that allows you to do UNO introspection.  This allows you to browse easily the family of available UNO methods, objects, properties, and so forth.  MRI is an indispensable first tool when doing UNO macro programming.

The download:

So you may ask, where can I get this MRI?!  Well here's where you can get the latest version.  The AOO site has the latest and greatest whereas the LO site only has version 1.1.2 stable and 1.1.4 pre-release, both of which only work with LO 3.x series.

Grab MRI from the AOO Extensions site here!

The nice thing about both AOO and LO both using UNO is that a lot of extensions for one will work on the other.  The downside is that because AOO and LO both use different versioning and they are slowly making their versions of UNO incompatible with each other (not out of spite but AOO is okay with Java depends and LO isn't, so LO is ditching a lot of interfaces that deal with that), their isn't a sure fire way to be absolutely sure that what works for AOO will work for LO and vice-versa.

Luckily, MRI works on AOO and LO versions 4.  That includes LO 4.1, but do note that I have not tested MRI 1.2.1 on LO 4.2 which is the next release.  There are quite a few changes in UNO in LO 4.2 so it will be interesting to see how MRI 1.2.1 works on that.

Install:

So once you download MRI, you'll need to add the extension to LO.  To do that, head over to Tools | Extension Manager in the main menu.  A dialog will appear

Extension Manager dialog

In the dialog click the "Add..." button.  This will open up a file browser.  From the file browser, find the MRI extension that you downloaded.  Once the extension is loaded, you'll need to restart LO to see the changes.

Double Check...

To double check that MRI was successful with the install.  Head over to the Tools menu again and you should see an option called "Add-Ons".  You should see in that menu "MRI" and "MRI ← selection".  The difference between the two is that "MRI" executes the extension with the current document as the parent object, the other uses whatever is currently selected as the parent object.

Make sure MRI is installed

Final:

With MRI you will now be able to perform introspection on the UNO tree, which as you will see soon enough, is pretty complex.  MRI allows one of the most important functions that the MS Office suite gets by default in its Basic environment, an object browser.  I will be referencing MRI a lot in the next few posts as I go over a bit of AOO/LO Basic.  So this is a good first step with learning the UNO basic environment.