Creating a macro in LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a free productivity suite that's an alternative to MS Office and other office packages. It includes, among others, a text editor called writer and a spreadsheet program called Calc. Calc understands the regular Excel formats, and it's also totally scriptable internally through its UNO API. The UNO interface allows programmatic access to the suite, and it's accessible in different languages, such as Java.

One of these available languages is Python, making it very easy to generate very complex applications in a suite format, as this enables the use of the full Python standard library.

Using the full Python standard library provides access to elements such as cryptography, opening external files (including zip files), and connecting to remote databases. Also, you can take advantage of the Python syntax and avoid dealing with LibreOffice BASIC.

We'll see in this recipe how to add an external...