14 DAY TRIAL // Back in January, the Document Foundation (TDF) announced that LibreOffice Viewer (Beta) for Android had been released in the Google Play Store and was available for download for users of mobile devices such as tablets and laptops.
For those of you out of the loop, LibreOffice is an open source, cross-platform suite of office apps that run on Linux, Windows and Mac. But TDF also wanted to port LibreOffice over to Android.
With LibreOffice Viewer, Android mobile users were able to set up text documents and basic presentations.
The app allows users to access their ODF files on the go, although several other formats were supported too, including the all-popular Microsoft Office Suite (97/2000/XP/2003/2007/2010/2013).
However, the app was a bit buggy (for example, we couldn't open an .odt file) and lacked editing capabilities.
LibreOffice for Android gains editing support
This week, the latest development build of LibreOffice for Android has been made available for download. You’ll need to install the APK on your phone or tablet to start working with the suite.
It still lacks one important aspect, however, the ability to create a new document. But leaving this aside, you can now open text, slideshow and spreadsheet documents and view them on your mobile device.
Even if you can’t create new documents from scratch, you will be able to save edited documents.
The user interface has been optimized to work in Android, with the addition of large finger-friendly buttons and support for mobile features like pinch-to-zoom and long-press to select text.
You can include images in your presentations that can in turn be re-sized by tapping to select and then dragging a corner. Users will be able to enter text via Android’s on-screen keyboard.
While there still are plenty of features that need to be added to the mobile version of LibreOffice, the Android version is slowly starting to shape up as a viable alternative to the popular Google Docs, QuickOffice, and Polaris Office.
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 open source suite ever since 2012.
