Category: LibreOffice

I’ve been struggling to resolve some odd infrequent problems with LibreOffice crashing for about a year now. The problems were not fixed by uninstalling and deleting my user profile as well as many other suggestions that had resolved similar issues for other users. The worst part was how usually the attempts would appear to help but it was always just a perception not a reality.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my NAS to a QNAP TS-231 and the problems got worse. I tried a whole bunch of things to fix the problems and nothing really worked. Yesterday the problems got severe enough (trashed ODB file) and repeatable enough that I decided to take some time to research them carefully.

It turns out at least some of the various problems were actually caused by the LibreOffice Windows Explorer Extension which had been a problem for me twice before since 2012. The solution is to simply remove the Explorer Extension as shown in my 2012 post. Now that this feature has caused me major problems for a third time I’m going to have to remember and recommend that whenever installing LibreOffice on a PC that will access files from a *nix based NAS, use the custom option when installing and avoid the Windows Explorer Extension like the plague.

I’ve had a problem with the LibreOffice Calc print preview function for a while. The problem is not showing the selected sheet(s) and I’ve always assumed it was more a problem with me than with the software. I finally got annoyed enough with my work around for the problem that I decided to search for an answer. The answer I found was 2½ years old making me feel even dumber for not looking sooner. So if you can’t get some sheets to show in print preview simply go to the sheets that do show and delete the defined print ranges (Format -> Print Ranges -> Remove). When you think about it this is the proper behavior, setting a print range tells Calc to not print anything else in the spreadsheet.

The blogroll on the left side has been empty for a long while. It used to be automatically updated via a  Google Reader feature but since the demise of Reader it stopped working. I hadn’t found any way to replace it with another automated system so today I manually created a blogroll. To avoid typing too much I exported my feeds from Feedly as OPML then converted that to a CSV file using this utility web service. Finally I re-arranged, cleaned up and deleted the extra data from the CSV in LibreOffice Calc and added a formula to make <a href> links out of the names and urls. Then I simply pasted the resulting list into a WordPress text widget.

I started having problems with ods files located on my NAS today. The problem only occurs when I try to open them from Windows Explorer, any other method works fine. The bug seems to have been tracked down to the LibreOffice Explorer extensions just like an older bug that also caused excessive network reading on my NAS as a symptom. The easiest fix is the same as for a bug from a year ago that I blogged about at the time.