Libre Office for Android Gains Support for Editing Documents
LibreOffice is an open source office suite for Windows, OSX, Linux, and now Android. Earlier this year Collabora and the The Document Foundation (the non-profit which supports LibreOffice) announced the development of a version of LibreOffice for Android. That very early release was buggy and unstable, and most importantly it lacked any way to actually edit files.
But development continued, and now the latest beta release supports editing documents. It also works a little better.
It still offers a far from complete suite of features and the tool can’t actually create a document from scratch, but if you download the latest development build you will find the app added some editing options to Writer, Calc, Draw, and Impress, including basic copy and past of text and images and simple text formatting (bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough).
The app also features support for opening and saving a broad range of office formats, including MS Office as well as Open Office formats (which are also used as the native for mat for LibreOffice).
The interface has also been optimized for touchscreens in general and Android in particular, which in part explains why the feature set is so limited; designing a touch interface for something as complex as an office suite is not a simple task.
that difficulty is part of the reason why Andropen Office, the Android port of Apache Open Office, still uses a desktop interface.
Andropen Office has been under development since 2013. I haven’t used it recently, but given how long it has been under development I would try this app first. It is going to be more functional and stable, and if nothing else, Andropen still looks like it is designed to work with a keyboard and mouse rather than a touchscreen. If I did a lot of office work on Android, I would be using those peripherals.
Collabora via Liliputing
Comments
Jason van Gumster April 22, 2015 um 10:51 am
I have high hopes for LibreOffice on Android (despite the fact that at this point, I’ve migrated most of my writing to vim). For feature-completeness, Andropen Office still has more functionality – particularly on a tablet with a bluetooth keyboard – but lacks some of the updates and features that have been included in LibreOffice since the initial fork… so syncing work between Android and desktop can be a little annoying.
fabrizio venerandi April 23, 2015 um 3:42 am
I’m using sometimes Andropen Office on e-ink using Onyx M96 and, yes, you need to use an external keyboard to use it.