LibreOffice consists of several application modules (subprograms) which are designed to integrate with each other. While this chapter contains information that applies to all LibreOffice modules, the following chapters and sections contain information on individual modules. Find a short description and where each module is described in Table 9.1, “The LibreOffice application modules”.

A full description of each module is available in the application help, described in Section 9.11, “More information”.

There are multiple methods to directly start one of the LibreOffice modules:

Before you start working with LibreOffice, you may be interested in changing some options from the Preferences dialog. In any LibreOffice module, click Tools › Options to open the dialog. The most important settings are:

To learn more about configuring LibreOffice, see Section 9.8, “Changing the global settings”.

The user interface of most of LibreOffice is very similar across its modules:

For more information on customizing LibreOffice, see Section 9.7, “Customizing LibreOffice”.

The native file format of LibreOffice is the OpenDocument format. OpenDocument is an ISO-standardized format for office documents that is based on XML. However, LibreOffice can also work with documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and databases in many other formats, including Microsoft Office formats. Files in Microsoft Office formats can be opened and saved back normally.

You can save files, no matter in which LibreOffice format, with a password. Unlike older versions of LibreOffice, the encryption applied to the document with recent versions of LibreOffice is very strong. However, this encryption does not protect file names and file sizes of encrypted files. If that is important to you, see the alternate encryption methods described in Book “Security and Hardening Guide”, Chapter 12 “Encrypting partitions and files”.

The next time you open the file, you will be prompted for the password.

To change the password, do either of the following:

You can digitally sign documents to protect them. For this, you need a personal certificate, similar to an HTTPS certificate. You can either create a self-signed certificate or choose to obtain one from a Certificate Authority. For more information of how to obtain such a certificate, please see https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/digitalsign_send.html.

When applying a digital signature to a document, a kind of checksum is created from the document's content and your personal key. The checksum is stored together with the document.

When another person opens the document, the checksum will be generated again. The new checksum is then compared to the original one. If both are equal, the application will signal that the document has not changed in the meantime.

To add a certificate to LibreOffice, you need to use Firefox:

To sign a document, first open it in LibreOffice. Then select File › Digital Signatures › Digital Signatures. Select the certificate you want to use for signing, then click Save.

For more info, refer to https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/digital_signatures.html?DbPAR=SHARED.

You can customize LibreOffice to best suit your needs and working style. Toolbars, menus, and key combinations can all be reconfigured to help you more quickly access the features you use the most.

You can also assign macros to application events if you want specific actions to occur when those events take place. For example, if you always work with a specific spreadsheet, you can create a macro that opens the spreadsheet and assign the macro to the Start Application event.

This section contains simple, generic instructions for customizing your environment. The changes you make are effective immediately. This means you can see if the changes are what you wanted and go back and modify them if they are not. See the LibreOffice help files for detailed instructions.

To access the customization dialog in any open LibreOffice module, select Tools › Customize.

Figure 9.1: Customization dialog in Writer #

Note: More information

Click Help for more information about the options in the Customize dialog.

Procedure 9.3: Customizing context menus #

You can modify commands, rearrange the items of a context menu, or even create new commands.

Note

The Context Menus tab is only available in an open document.

1. Open a document. In the customization dialog, click the tab Context Menus.

2. In the left column, select a Category. In the right column, select the Target.

3. To add a separator or submenu, click Insert. To rename a command, select the command in the right column and click Modify.

4. To switch back to the original settings, click Defaults and confirm with Yes.

5. To save the changes, click OK.

Procedure 9.5: Customizing key combinations #

You can reassign key combinations and assign new ones to frequently used functions.

Note

The Keyboard tab is only available in an open document.

1. Open a document and click Tools › Customize › Keyboard.

2. In the Shortcut Keys box, select the key or key combination you want to assign a command to.

3. Select a Category and Function at the bottom of the dialog.

4. Click Modify to assign the function to the key or Delete to remove an existing assignment.

5. To save the changes, click OK.

Global settings can be changed in any LibreOffice module by clicking Tools › Options on the menu bar. This opens the window shown in the figure below. A tree structure is used to display categories of settings.

Figure 9.2: The options window #

The settings categories that appear depend on the module you are working in. For example, if you are in Writer, the LibreOffice Writer category appears in the list, but the LibreOffice Calc category does not. The LibreOffice Base category appears in both Calc and Writer. The Module column in the table shows where each setting category is available.

The following table lists the settings categories along with a brief description of each category:

Important: Settings apply globally

All settings listed in the table apply globally for the specified modules. That means, they are used as defaults for every new document you create.

A template is a document containing only the styles—and content— that you want to appear in every document of that type. When a document is created or opened with the template, the styles are automatically applied to that document. Templates greatly enhance the use of LibreOffice by simplifying formatting tasks for a variety of different types of documents.

For example, in a word processor, you can write letters, memos, and reports, all of which look different and require different styles. Or, for example, for spreadsheets, you could use different cell styles or headings for certain types of spreadsheets. If you use templates for each of your document types, the styles you need for each document are always readily available.

LibreOffice comes with a set of predefined templates. You can also find additional templates on the Internet, for example at https://extensions.libreoffice.org/. For details, see Section 9.11, “More information”.

Creating your own templates requires some planning. You need to determine how you want the document to look, so you can create the styles you need in that template.

A detailed explanation of templates is beyond the scope of this section. Procedure 9.6, “Creating LibreOffice templates” only shows how to generate a template from an existing document.

Note: Converting Microsoft Word templates

You can convert Microsoft Word templates like you would convert any other Word document. For more information, see Section 9.4.2, “Converting documents to the OpenDocument format”.

When exchanging documents with other people, it is sometimes useful to store metadata like the owner of the file, who it was received from, and a URL. LibreOffice lets you attach such metadata to the file. This helps you track metadata which you do not want to or cannot save in the content of the file. This feature is also the basis for later sorting, searching and retrieving your documents based on metadata.

As an example, we assume you want to set these properties to your file:

To attach such metadata to your document, proceed as follows:

LibreOffice has extensive online help. In addition, a large community of users and developers support it. The following list shows some places where you can go for additional information.