Essential tips for LibreOffice

LibreOffice has become the office suite most important in the free software landscape, with important advances since it began as a fork of OpenOffice after the movements of Oracle after the purchase of Sun Microsystems. Lately they are enhancing one of their weak points, the graphical interface that is still far from perfect and is presented as one of the biggest problems when it comes to facing Microsoft Office.

Despite this, it is compatible with multitude of formats, both native to Microsoft Office and the open formats themselves, which are the natives with which LibreOffice and other free office suites work. In addition, the possibilities in terms of functions of this suite and that of Microsoft are equivalent and the same work can be done. I insist, making self-criticism, there are still some details to touch up and improve, but it is one of the best alternatives that exist.

But no software or operating system is good in the hands of someone who cannot take advantage of its capabilities, since you will be wasting the potential. Therefore, in this article we are going to give a series of tricks for the LibreOffice suite that will change the way you work with it, making its use more pleasant, simple, productive and efficient, which after all is what all users are looking for, in addition to taking advantage of its functionalities.

And what I have said in the previous paragraph is very important, since many of the complaints or disappointments that users take when landing in LibreOffice and that they come from Microsoft Office they are basically reduced to not knowing how to use or take advantage of the qualities of LibreOffice as they were doing in MS Office, making them crazy and making them go back to the Redmond suite. But if you know how to master it and get used to it, you may not miss commercial software.

Tips for LibreOffice

Many tips and tricks that exist on the net for LibreOffice are mostly intended to improve its performance, but in this megapost we do not want to focus only on the performance tricks, but be somewhat more generic and cover other points that allow us to improve in our daily use when we work with office documents and provide agility.

Tips and tricks to improve LibreOffice performance

So that our LibreOffice be something faster, avoiding wasting valuable seconds that can add to our work time to increase productivity and efficiency, we can make some adjustments in the suite. If you open any of the programs integrated in the office suite, such as LibreOffice Writer, you can go to the Tools tab on the top menu and then click on Options.

On the right you will see that there are several items to select, within LibreOffice you will see an option called Memory. We are shown a series of memory related settings. What we should touch is:

• Reduce Number of steps in the Undo parameter. This reduces the number of times you can hit the undo button to go back to the modifications you make in the text sheet. The higher this number is, the more flexibility it will allow you when it comes to going back, but the more memory it will occupy by having to store more steps ...
• La Image Cache is another important part. You can set 256MB maximum if you don't use too many images in your text sheet, but if you use a lot, you may want to leave more. And if you only use it for text, you can lower it to the minimum to save memory.
• Object Memory, you can set it to about 50MB. In this case, if your documents are not very "multimedia" you can download it without fear, since this space is reserved to handle elements that are not text or image, such as graphics, audio, etc.
• Si we set the image cache memory after 00:05 min, time. I insist, all this will depend on the amount of memory you have in your system and the uses that you give to LibreOffice, these figures being indicative ... The same for the cache of inserted objects.

Another option that we can touch is if we want that LibreOffice starts with the system, something that I do not recommend. It can be good if you use it every day and it is a must-have for your work, but if the use is more random, the only thing we will do is overload the startup and slow it down.

Continuing with the items, within LibreOffice you can also find the option called Advanced. In it you can touch some values, such as technology Java, which you can disableas it is usually not used and the performance difference is quite obvious.

As for the the toolbars we see In the main menu, if there is one that you never use, better remove it and it will improve agility. For that, from the main screen, go to the View tab and then download the toolbars that you do not want to be seen. Anyway, you know that if you need them in the future you can reactivate them by reversing this step. More tips or tricks to improve performance are disabling rules and text limits from the View tab of the main menu, helping to have a cleaner and faster GUI.

If you wish you can also go to Tools, Auto correction options and in the Word Completion menu uncheck the Enable word completion box. If you don't want or don't use word autocompletion, which in my opinion is sometimes annoying, you can contribute to performance.

Finally I would recommend uninstall dictionaries you don't use. They are taking up space for nothing. To do this, go to Tools, Options and then in the Language Settings menu. From there you select the Writing Assistance option and review the modules you have available to remove the ones you don't need.

Keyboard shortcuts for LibreOffice

Another of the things that can save us time, or rather save it, are keyboard shortcuts. Quick accesses by means of the combination of keys. For a better understanding for the reader, instead of explaining one by one using points, I put them in this table:

This in terms of more generic use of LibreOffice, but if you want shortcuts for a specific program, you can look at this table for LibreOffice Writer:

For LibreOffice Calc, you can use:

And finally, for LibreOffice Base:

There are many more keyboard shortcuts for LibreOffice, but these are the most used, especially navigation. For more information you can access the LIbreOffice help website.

Other tips for everyday LibreOffice use

Some other interesting tools that LibreOffice integrates and that you should know about are the option to Export to PDF that you can find in the File menu, allowing you to save the document in PDF format, something that is appreciated and that in the past was not available in Microsoft Office and you had to install other programs or extensions to be able to do so. It is integrated into LibreOffice from the start and can save a lot of work to convert documents to PDF.

You should also know that LibreOffice has a large number of Extensions to install, something like the plugins or addons that you can find in some browsers to extend their capabilities. Many of them are very interesting and that you can find here by categories. Select the one you want or the ones you want and you can download and then install the .oxt that is downloaded by double clicking on it.

More details that you should know, the possibility of changing the appearance of your workspace. Although you can modify it more deeply, but you can change background color of the program to make it more pleasing to the eye according to your taste. To do this, go to the Tools menu, then Options, and in LibreOffice you can select Appearance. In this section you can modify the colors to your liking, but also, in the Personalization option that is just above Appearance, you will also find a tool to install your own or ready-made themes ...

If you have any questions or suggestions, you just have to leave a comment. Some contributions of tricks that you know and have not been included in the list will also be welcome, so we will help all readers to improve their daily work.