We have been expecting LibreOffice on Android for a while

Jan 21, 2015 13:57 GMT  ·  By

A few months ago we told you that one of the hottest office suites out there, LibreOffice, was in development for the Android consumer base. The report also mentioned that the app would be made available soon, but no specific dates were given.

Well, it took The Document Foundation (TDF) some time, but this week we’re happy to announce that LibreOffice Viewer (Beta) for Android has been released in the Google Play Store and is available for download to users of mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones.

LibreOffice for Android is in active development

The first release brings along basic features, so users will be able to set up text documents and basic presentations. TDF says that support for spreadsheets is also available in the beta version, but more complex operations will be made available with future updates.

The app allows users to access their ODF files on the go, although several other formats are also supported, including the all-popular Microsoft Office Suite (97/2000/XP/2003/2007/2010/2013).

Although Open Document Formats like .odt, .odp, .ods, .ots, .ott and .otp are said also to be supported, I couldn’t open an .odt file.

The Document Foundation encourages users, companies and organizations to download the app, test it out and point out the incongruities.

Test it out yourself

TDF is planning many more features in the upcoming months like interactive document elements (e.g URLs) and support for browsing external SD storage, but you’ll have to be patient.

LibreOffice for Android has been created by Collabora with added support from SMOOSE. Engineers TOR Lillqvist, Tomaž Vajngerl, and Michael Meeks have been hard at work developing the Android version of the popular office suite ever since 2012.

So if you’re curious to see their work, go on to Google Play, download the applications and tell us what you think and if you have encountered any bugs, like the one I mentioned above.

LibreOffice for Android (4 Images)

What is LibreOffice?
Getting started with LibreOfficeBrowsing documents/presentations
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