LibreOffice Writer: Saving, Printing, and Exporting (to PDF) a Document
Updated: Aug 4
August 1, 2026
Welcome back to our tutorials on LibreOffice Writer. In the previous tutorial, we provided an overview of how to navigate around LibreOffice Writer and how to locate various program functions on the toolbars. If you are migrating to Ubuntu from Windows, hopefully you are seeing how familiar operating LibreOffice Writer feels to Word. This time, we'll be showing you how to save a document, print a document, and export a document to a PDF format. We'll be doing all of this in the File menu in the top-most toolbar, but you can also perform these actions in the middle toolbar.
Saving a document
We're not going to beat around the bush here. Saving your document is the most important thing to learn how to do in LibreOffice Writer. If you already experimented around in the previous tutorial and wrote something you want to save, we'll show you how to do that here.
Step 1
Open the File tab in the top-most toolbar and move your mouse down to either Save or Save As... If you are saving your document for the first time, choose Save As... because this will allow you to not only choose a name for your document, but also where you want to save it to on your device. Hitting Save on a new document will also do this.
Step 2
If you chose Save As... or hit Save on a new document, you will be shown a popup window in which LibreOffice Writer will display your Home folder, Documents folder, Downloads folder, Music folder, Pictures folder, Videos folder, and any other storage devices and network folder locations (if you have any connected to Ubuntu) on the left side of the window. LibreOffice Writer will always default to showing your Documents folder, but if you down't want to save your document in the Documents folder, you can choose one of the folders on the left side. If you want to add a folder inside of a folder such as Documents or Home without exiting the save window, you can click the folder with a plus icon in the top right-hand corner of the window and it will ask for a name for the folder you are creating. You can then double-click that folder you just created to go into it, just as you would do in Windows. In the bottom left-hand corner of the save window, you can see there are three boxes. Generally, I don't touch these, but you can choose the box "Encrypt with a GPG key" if you want to encrypt your LibreOffice Writer document with a public and private key and "Save with password" encrypts the document with a text password of your choosing. The "Edit filter settings" box will be grayed out for most users unless they are trying to save the document in an XML format. In this case, I am saving my document in a .odt format. The file format can be changed on the bottom right side of the save window.
Step 3
Choosing your file format for your document is very important. If you only have open-source operating systems like Ubuntu that you use, you will be fine sticking with the ODT file format. This is the OpenDocument Format and is not only compatible with the LibreOffice suite, but also OpenOffice, which is another LibreOffice-esque program suite. Windows computers and Word can read and open these file types, but if you do so on a Windows device, expect formatting errors and incompatible font types. As we mentioned in a previous tutorial, if you are collaborating with others who use Windows and Word, you will want to make sure you are saving your document in the DOCX file format. This is for Word 2010 to Word 365, which is, at the time of writing this, the most recent form of Word. If you are collaborating with someone who uses a version of Word that is older than the 2010 edition, there are labeled file type options for those too. You can also choose to save the file as a TXT file format, but doing so gets rid of all of the text formatting you used in your document. Once you've chosen your file name, file location, encryption (optional), and file format, hit the green Save button in the top right-hand corner to save your document.
Exporting your file to a PDF
If you need to export your file to a read-only PDF version, you'll want to check out this section. Exporting your document to a PDF can be useful if you are sharing your work with others and you don't want them to be able to edit the contents of your document. To do so, in the File tab, move your mouse down to Export As and choose Export as PDF...
This will open up the PDF Options window. I usually just leave everything alone in here, but if you need to, for example, add a watermark to your PDF document, you can do so in here by clicking the box next to "Sign with watermark" and adding whatever text you want as the watermark in the box next to it. Also, if you want to view your PDF file after you export it as a PDF, check the box next to "View PDF after export". When you are ready, hit the Export button to Export your file to a PDF format. It will then ask you in a window similar to the Save As... window we saw earlier where you want to save your PDF document. This is the same process as that. Don't worry, though. By saving your document as a PDF, it will not get rid of the original editable LibreOffice Writer file you created. That will still be located on your computer where you saved it.
Print Previewing and Printing your document
If you're ready to print your document, then this section's for you. Start by again opening the File tab and you'll find Print Preview and Print... near the bottom of the menu. I usually go into Print Preview before I print anything and I would advise you to do the same because there may be formatting errors you don't catch until your preview the document first. We'll be going into Print Preview for this, but if you decide to choose Print... instead, then you can bypass the next part.
If you chose Print Preview, you will be shown a screen that will display your document's first two pages. You can advance backwards and forwards through your document's pages with the "<" and ">" buttons in the left-hand corner of the window. You can also advance to the beginning and end of the document with the "|<" and ">|" buttons in the left-hand side of the window near the "<" and ">" buttons. You can adjust the preview window's zoom by pressing the plus and minus magnifying glass buttons in the left-hand side of the window. The number in between them shows the current zoom magnification. If you need to go back and make corrections to your document before your print it, you can click the "Close Preview" button in the top middle part of the window or if you are ready to print the document, click "Print" near there.
When you are ready to print your document, you will see the Print window as shown below. Here, you can choose the printer you want to print your document to (Ubuntu will usually automatically add it as a printer you can print to if you have the printer available to all users on your network and have your Ubuntu computer connected to that same network, if not, though, there is a tutorial coming for that!), the print properties, which pages to print, how many copies of those pages you wish to print, whether to include odd and even pages, and whether you want to have the pages be double sided to save paper. There is also a box to print the pages in the reverse order (from the last page to the first). When you're ready, hit the green Print button in the bottom right-hand corner of the window and your document will be sent to your printer.
And that's it for the tutorial on saving, printing, and exporting to PDF! There will be additional tutorials for LibreOffice Writer in the future, but hopefully, these three tutorials have given you a basic overview of how LibreOffice Writer works. As usual, if there is anything you feel we didn't cover or would like clarification on, please reach out to us through our Contact form on the homepage here. Thank you for reading and hopefully this helped!
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