LibreOffice viewer app for Android
Outdoor Office Helper
The LibreOffice Viewer for Android displays office documents on mobile devices and now even has simple editing features. We investigate whether the smartphone and tablet app is useful as a helper for the main office suite.
At the end of May 2015, the LibreOffice developers released the first stable version of LibreOffice Viewer for Android on Google play [1]. The free app has been released under the Mozilla Public License and was developed in cooperation with Igalia, Collabora, and Smoose, as well as some Google Summer of Code students. If you run Android without Google, you will find an APK at the Document Foundation website [2].
The viewer uses the same engine as the desktop version of LibreOffice. The front end is based on Firefox for Android. According to the release notes, the app displays the free ODT, ODS, and ODP formats, and the Microsoft DOX, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, and PPTX formats. An experimental editing feature provides tools for bold and italic fonts as well as underline and strikethrough.
LibreOffice Viewer requires at least Android 4.0. The test team installed the app on a tablet (Tolino Tab 8.9 with Android 4.2.2) and on a smartphone (Galaxy Nexus, Android 4.3) and tasked the mobile office assistant with opening Writer, Calc, and Impress files as well as MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents; we also tried to edit them (Table 1) in the viewer. One thing up front: The app did not open password-protected documents as a matter of principle – it even crashed reproducibly.
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