OFFICE APPLICATIONS

Office applications:

  • LibreOffice/ Google suite as office suite
  • Qpdfview as Pdf reader
  • Fbreader as ebook reader

1. LibreOffice as office suite:

For normal use of office work, LibreOffice is competent enough:

https://www.libreoffice.org/

You can either install the entire of this office suite or pick out only what you need. I only use two of the modules:

  • Calc: spreadsheet application.
  • Writer: word processing application.
apt-get install libreoffice-calc libreoffice-writer libreoffice-gtk

The libreoffice-gtk package is for Libreoffice can integrate nicely with the system gtk theme (otherwise it will look urgly).

You can choose one from several icon sets. In the screenshot below I am using the “sifr” icon sets:

apt-get install libreoffice-style-sifr

Then apply it by changing the “Icon size and styles” (User Interface) to “sifr”, go to Tool > Options > View.

To enable the ability to remember the last working place in your document, you need to fill out your “User Data”. Go to Tool > Options > User Data.

If there is no user identified, every time you open a document, LibreOffice will assume it is a new user and direct you to the beginning.

As a die hard user of spreadsheets, I only use Calc for “lite” spreadsheet work only. I am intensively depending on VBA/ GAS scripts (Visual Basic for Applications come with MS office/ Google Apps Script come with Google Apps). Only Microsoft Excel or Google Sheet can meet my requirements.

LibreOffice Calc

libreoffice-calc

LibreOffice Writer

libreoffice-writer

UPDATE 26 Nov 2019: I have been using Google Docs, Spreadsheet, Mail, Calendar, Drive, Form… as my productivity tools for over two full years. In fact, the contact form of this website is a Google form. I cannot express how awesome they are enough. Please give them a try!

UPDATE 18 Dec 2019: Today I used Calc the first time since updating to Debian 10 Buster and I noticed that the display is not compatible with the gtk3 theme (small font…). I need to installed libreoffice-gtk3 package to fix the problem.

sudo apt-get install libreoffice-gtk3

2. Qpdfview as Pdf reader

I have found qpdfview, quickly open any PDF file and render images nicely:

sudo apt-get install qpdfview

In the old version of this website, I recommended Foxit reader (very good indeed!), but is was not a native of Linux, and needed a PPA so I switched to qpdfview.

3. Fbreader as ebook reader

https://fbreader.org/

apt-get install Fbreader

“Supports popular ebook formats: ePub, fb2, mobi, rtf, html, plain text, and a lot of other formats” (From its website!).

fbreader

Above is the awesome Quo Vadis novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz, translated by Jeremiah Curtin.

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