LibreOffice Productivity Suite
LibreOffice is the power-packed free, libre and open source personal productivity suite for GNU/Linux, Macintosh, and Windows, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base.
Key Features
- Developer community supported compatibility with Microsoft Office.
- Many professional features, including Mail Merge, PDF import via Draw, and PDF output.
Installation
OpenOffice.org was part of the default Ubuntu installation, but this has been replaced by LibreOffice since Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty). OpenOffice.org is deprecated and is no longer supported by Ubuntu. For information on installing LibreOffice please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LibreOffice.
Reporting LibreOffice bugs in Ubuntu
Please see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LibreOfficeBugWrangling.
Hints and Tips
Currently the Macro Recorder functionality is considered experimental and may be enabled via Tools -> Options... -> LibreOffice -> General -> Enable experimental (unstable) features
If one gets Err:502 due to a negative under a square root function, please use IMSQRT() or the other imaginary functions http://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Add-in_Functions,_List_of_Analysis_Functions_Part_Two
UsingJavaDatabaseConnectivityAndLibreOffice - Instructions on using LibreOffice to edit MySQL Database files using JDBC connectivity
Google Doc Extension - Instruction on installing Google Doc extension to LibreOffice
Manual OpenDocument Repair
- One may find themselves in a situation where opening a document produces an error message like:
Read-Error. Format error discovered in the file in sub-document content.xml at 2,135632 (row,col).
- You may attempt a repair of the document manually. One will want to make a backup:
cp example.odt example_original.odt
- Make a new directory:
mkdir repair
- Unzip example.odt into the repair directory:
unzip example.ods -d repair
- After unzipping open from the repair folder content.xml with a text editor:
gedit repair/content.xml
Once the offending (row,col) is found and no obvious errors exist (mispelling, etc.) then one will have to consult the odf specification for pointers on acceptable syntax: http://www.oasis-open.org/standards#opendocumentv1.1 . If no obvious syntax errors exist, one may try deleting the offending start tag, content, and end tag.
- Zip the extracted data back to one ODT document:
zip repair-example.odt repair/*
- Try to open the repaired document:
lowriter repair-example.odt
If one gets the following message:
The file 'repair-example.ods' is corrupt and therefore cannot be opened. LibreOffice can try to repair the file. The corruption could be the result of document manipulation or of structural document damage due to data transmission. We recommend that you do not trust the content of the repaired document. Execution of macro is disabled for this document. Should LibreOffice repair the file?
click Yes, and get a window noting:
The file '$(ARG1)' could not be repaired and therefore cannot be opened.
you may want to start over and try editing or deleting more or less.
Other office productivity applications you may wish to look at
- Abiword Word Processor
- Gnumeric Spreadsheet
- Gnome Office
- KOffice