LibreOffice Calc: The Basics

August 24, 2026

Welcome to the beginning of the LibreOffice Calc series where we will be taking a look at LibreOffice Calc, the free to use, open-source equivalent of spreadsheet programs like Excel. As this is part of the LibreOffice suite, make sure you have installed LibreOffice on the App Center before continuing. You can learn how to do that in our post here. In this post, I will be going over the basics of the app.

Where do I find Libre Office Calc?

After LibreOffice has been installed, we can find LibreOffice Calc our Show Apps scree, found by clicking on the Ubuntu circle icon on your desktop dashboard. You can then pin it to your dashboard for easy access in the future by right clicking the app and selecting "Pin to Dash". I have mine already on my dashboard, so I will be skipping this step, myself. The LibreOffice Calc app has a green icon, which I will also picture below.

The Application icon for LibreOffice Calc.

The Show Apps screen. The Show Apps button with the Ubuntu logo is pictured in the bottom left-hand corner in the image on the dashboard.

Using LibreOffice Calc

LibreOffice Calc is designed to be very similar in design and function to Excel to make it easy for Windows users to transition to the software. When you load the application, you will see a screen like the one pictured below.

There is a grid of rows and cells that you can add data to or customize to your liking. You can see again, that LibreOffice Calc bears a striking resemblance to Excel. Let's start by taking a look at the toolbars.

At the top of the screen, we have three rows of toolbars. You have your standard Windows-like format of File, Edit, Insert, etc. and below it are two quick function toolbars for performing commonly used actions, such as saving the spreadsheet, printing it, exporting it to a PDF file format, changing font types, font sizes, adding bold, italicized, or underlined text, etc. Unique to LibreOffice Calc, we also have the row and column buttons. You can perform quick actions with these such as adding rows or columns below or above selected rows or columns, changing the heights of selected or all rows in the spreadsheet, changing the width of selected or all columns in the spreadsheet, and adding row or column breaks.

The toolbars of LibreOffice Calc.

The row and column buttons.

Now that we have seen the basics of how to use the application, let's check out some of the basic spreadsheet creation tools.

Resizing rows and columns

Rows and columns can be easily resized to fit your needs by clicking and dragging the borders on the left or right of the column or top or bottom of the row. To know when you can resize a row or column, move your mouse's cursor over the border lines until you see your cursor change into a dual-direction arrow icon and then you can drag and resize as you see fit. You can also select the headers for the row or column in question by clicking on A, B, C, etc. or 1, 2, 3, etc. and then they will be highlighted as shown below.

A highlighted column with the resizing left-right arrow to indicate that column A can be resized by clicking and dragging to the left or right.

Merging rows and columns

Merging rows and columns can be a good way to visualize a longer string of data in one cell. Generally, it is better practice to simply resize a column or cell, but this can be handy when you are trying to create title headers for your spreadsheet. This can be done by holding down the control or 'Ctrl' button on your keyboard and simulataneously clicking on each neighboring row or column you want to merge. When you have your rows or columns you want to merge selected, stop holding the control button and right click one of the selected rows or columns and click the 'Merge Cells' option in the drop-down window that appears.

Merging cells A1 to B2.

Merging two columns.

Adding rows above or below

Finally, we will offer you another way to add rows above or below a selected row. If you've ever entered data and thought, "I forgot to add this data before this data" and felt you had to undo or delete the data below to make room for the forgotten data, this is for you. We already hinted at the row and column buttons on the toolbar having this functionality, but you can also do this by clicking the row number and right-clicking the highlighted row and choosing either 'Insert Rows Above' or 'Insert Rows Below'. The same can be done to columns by selecting the column letter and choosing 'Insert Columns Before' or 'Insert Columns After'.

Inserting rows above or below for row 3.

That covers about everything in our introduction to LibreOffice Calc. Hopefully, if you are a longtime Windows user, you have become more comfortable with Calc. In the next Calc tutorial, we'll be going over how to perform certain functions such as totaling and averaging in the application. I hope this helped and if you became stuck on anything or if there is anything you would like us to make a tutorial on that we have not yet covered, please reach out to us via our Contact form on our homepage. Thanks for reading!