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| <head> | ||
| <title>How to improve LibreOffice's Microsoft Office compatibility</title> | ||
| <title>The Ultimate LibreOffice Setup</title> | ||
| </head> | ||
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| <header> | ||
| Tips & Tutorials | ||
| <h1> | ||
| How to improve LibreOffice's Microsoft Office compatibility | ||
| The Ultimate LibreOffice Setup | ||
| </h1> | ||
| <ul> | ||
| 15 Dec, 2022 | ||
| 272 words | ||
| 1 minute read | ||
| 16 Jul, 2022 | ||
| 990 words | ||
| 4.5 minute read | ||
| </ul> | ||
| </header> | ||
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| **THIS ARTICLE IS MISSING IMAGES AS PART OF THE SITE REWRITE. IT WILL BE FIXED SOON** | ||
| Document editing is a horrible business that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Fighting formats, muddled margins, puzzling paragraph breaks, annoying autocorrect, and stumbling spell checking leads to a mess of text that can't be combated by even the most confident keyboard cowboys. | ||
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| If you've recently made the switch to LibreOffice from Microsoft Office then you may be struggling with adapting your workflow or viewing .docx files. This tutorial aims to help with the configuration of LibreOffice to improve both it's compatibility and it's usability. | ||
| I've spent a lot of time trying to wrangle my word editing and perfect my proofreading performance by configuring and tweaking my LibreOffice setup to perfection. First thing to look is why I chose LibreOffice over any other document suite. | ||
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| ## Improving the Ribbon | ||
| Ya know that little bar at the top with all the buttons on it? By default it is *very* different from what features in MS Office. Don't worry! We can improve it. | ||
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| At the top of the program click View>User Interface. | ||
| ## Best Suite | ||
| I feel it'd be wrong to write this article without at least mentioning the many document editing suites available and how I came to deciding on LibreOffice. I've highlighted what I feel are reasonable choices that are under support. This means I've excluded suites such as KOffice, AbiWord, and OpenOffice. | ||
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| An interface similar to what you see below will appear. Select 'Tabbed' and then 'Apply to all'. This ensures that it will be on every application. | ||
| [Microsoft Office](https://www.office.com) is obviously the biggest and arguably the best. It really needs no introduction, everyone uses Microsoft Office and it has near endless features. It's backed by a huge corporation and works pretty well. The caveat is that it's locked behind an expensive subscription service and has telemetry built in. It's also not available on Linux which completely writes it off for me. | ||
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| [Calligra](https://calligra.org) was another I looked at. It seemed rather nice but is lacking many features that I would expect and was designed for KDE, a desktop environment I don't use. I do quite like it for mobile document editing thought and I recommend it for Android tablet users. | ||
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| ## Installing the Fonts | ||
| Microsoft have a lot of their own fonts that don't come pre-packaged with | ||
| Linux. Luckily for us we can install them with ease. | ||
| [iWork](https://www.apple.com/iwork) is Apple's offering. I used it on my iPad 4 circa 2015. It's alright. I don't own a MacBook. | ||
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| There is a very useful Arch Wiki article on it [here](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Microsoft_fonts). | ||
| [OnlyOffice](https://www.onlyoffice.com) is a pretty fully featured option but it gave me a lot of popups and web based, rather then native which effects integrations with my computer. It does have very nice support for Microsoft Office's formatting out of the box though. | ||
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| ## Removing Format Warnings | ||
| Chances are that you will end up using Microsoft's file types. To hide the | ||
| warnings that often pop up when using these file types open | ||
| Options>Load/Save>General and untick 'Warn when not saving in ODF or default | ||
| format' | ||
| The best office suite I've found has to be [LibreOffice](https://www.libreoffice.org). It integrates well into my computer, is fast, and is pretty fully featured. It's seen good support and shows little indication of slowing down. For that reason it's my number one choice. | ||
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| ## Installation | ||
| LibreOffice comes in two main versions, still and fresh. Still is a stable version that doesn't get very frequent updates and lags behind in features so I recommend Fresh. It has modern features and is still pretty stable. On Arch Linux (my Linux distro of choice) it can be installed with `libreoffice-fresh`. | ||
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| ## Improving Shapes | ||
| Shapes from MS Office don't have perfect compatibility by default, to fix this | ||
| we can go to Options>Load/Save> General and tick 'SmartArt to LibreOffice shapes | ||
| or reverse'. | ||
| ## General Setup | ||
| The Arch Wiki has a wonderful guide, as always, on how to setup LibreOffice for general use. You can read it [here](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/LibreOffice) and I very much recommend following it before the rest of my setup. It is Arch specific but most can be translated for your distro. If you don't use Linux then you can skip this section and move directly onto the next step. A few things I'd like to point out for my ultimate setup is that I use GTK for theming, disable the startup logo, and install texmaths for LaTeX support. I don't install the fonts as outlined in that guide as I do a different way for improved Microsoft Office compatibility. | ||
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| ## Theming | ||
| Out of the box LibreOffice isn't perfect. It looks alright but some work is need. If, like me, you chose to use GTK for theming then you can use [Gradience](https://gradienceteam.github.io) to get it looking just how you want. That said, do read [this](https://stopthemingmy.app) before using it. If you don't use GTK (or use something other then Linux) then you can ignore that and just change the icons. For this you can navigate to `Tools > Options` in the menubar of any of the applications. In the popup window navigate to `LibreOffice > View` and change the icon theme. I recommend the SVG version of Sukapura. You can choose the light or dark variant depending on your theme. | ||
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| ## Improving Microsoft Office Compatibility | ||
| <span class="info"> | ||
| If you're wondering then yes, this part of the article has been around before. It had some issues and was rather narrow in scope so I've since rewritten it. You can read the original from December 2022 on the Internet Archive <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230117143302/https://vale.rocks/blog/tutorials/LibreOffice_Setup">here</a>. | ||
| </span> | ||
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| If you're coming from Microsoft Office or have to interact with Microsoft's formats then you may struggle with adapting your workflow or dealing with Office files. You should note that applications in LibreOffice have different names to those in MS Office. Word is Writer, PowerPoint is Impress, Excel is Calc To follow this bit of the guide open up one of the applications within the suite, such as Writer. | ||
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| ### Changing the Ribbon | ||
| By default, the ribbon (that collection of icons at the top of the program) in LibreOffice is more reminiscent of MS Office 9x then MS Office 365. There is, fortunately, an easy fix. In the top menubar click `View > User Interface`. In the popup window that appears select 'Tabbed' and then 'Apply to all'. This ensures that it will apply not just to the current program you're using but the entire suite. | ||
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| ### Installing Fonts | ||
| Microsoft have a lot of their own fonts that don't come pre-packaged with Linux. Luckily for us they can generally be installed with relative ease. If using Arch Linux then then is a very useful Arch Wiki article on it [here](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Microsoft_fonts). If you aren't using Arch then I wish you the best of luck. | ||
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| ### Removing Format Warnings | ||
| LibreOffice often screams at you if you use MS Office filetypes. You can hide these warnings when saving files you can navigate to the `hamburger menu > Options`. In the popup you can then navigate to `Load/Save > General` and then untick 'Warn when not saving in ODF or default format'. | ||
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| ### Improving Shapes | ||
| Shapes from MS Office don't have perfect compatibility by default, to fix this we can navigate to the `hamburger menu > Options > Load/Save > Microsoft Office` and tick 'SmartArt to LibreOffice shapes or reverse'. | ||
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| --- | ||
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| Do you know any other good settings to change or compatibility practices? Leave | ||
| your suggestions in a comment. | ||
| Do you know any other good settings to change or compatibility practices? Leave your suggestions in a comment. |
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