LibreOffice Writer: The Page View and Toolbars
Updated: Aug 4
August 1, 2026
Now that the LibreOffice suite is installed, it's time to take a look at basic functions of LibreOffice Writer. Start by opening LibreOffice Writer if you haven't already. What you'll see when you first open the app is the view of the page.
If you're transitioning from Windows to an operating system like Ubuntu, you'll notice it looks almost identical to Word. This is an intentional design choice by Canonical in order to make it as easy as possible for new Ubuntu users to understand LibreOffice Writer. You'll notice the toolbars at the top of the screen look especially familiar. Let's check them out.
The Top-Most Toolbar
On the top-most toolbar, you will find your typical Word-like menus. When you click on File, you can find Save and Save as... for saving and renaming your saved document as well as Print and Print preview. Similarly, in the Edit menu, you can find tools like Select All, and in View, you can adjust your view of the page view. You will note that Table is not in the Insert tab and that is because in the Insert tab, you can add a table and then you would go into the Table tab to change the format and preferences of the table you created. The Window tab can be helpful if you want to create another document without having to close your current document and the Window tab also allows you to switch between your opened documents. You can also switch between your opened documents by clicking on the LibreOffice Writer icon on your desktop toolbar. The Help tab can be helpful if you need help figuring out how to do something in LibreOffice Writer.
The Middle Toolbar
The middle toolbar is a bit more unique to LibreOffice Writer. This toolbar has icons for various quick actions you can perform in the program. There are icons for opening and saving a document, exporting/creating a PDF version of the current document, printing and previewing the document before printing, cut, paste, and a variety of other commonly-used actions. Move your mouse over each one to get a tooltip box to appear over each one to get a general idea of what each quick action does.
The Bottom Toolbar
The bottom toolbar has a two parts to it. On the left, there are different header styles and paragraph styles as well as different fonts to choose from. Keep in mind, the fonts you have available to you in LibreOffice Writer are only available in LibreOffice Writer and its associated filetype, .odt. If you are collaborating with other writers in the case of research papers or sending a draft of a book to a publisher, make sure you use a .docx filetype when saving and distributing your document to your collaborators and download and use a font such as Times New Roman that Windows devices can read. You can download Times New Roman to Ubuntu by following the guide here. We'll go over saving your document and the various filetypes in the next blog post. On the right side of the bottom toolbar, we'll find additional text tools. Here, we can see there is a button to make selected text bold, italicized, underlined, and you can even strike through text. There is also a button to add superscript and subscript formatted text (exponents), remove all text formatting, such as bold text or italicized text, and change the font color and highlight selected text. To the right of those tools, we have text alignment tools (left, center, right, and justified), unordered lists and ordered lists for creating bullet points or a numbered list, increase text indentation, reduce text indentation, and the ability to change the spacing between paragraphs.
That's about it for an overview of the display and toolbars in LibreOffice Writer. Feel free to move your mouse over all of these buttons to see a tooltip box for each button and really familiarize yourself with the program. Try these functions out in your own document as well to see firsthand how they work. As always, if there is anything you feel we didn't cover or should cover in more detail, please reach out to us in the Contact form at the bottom of the homepage here. In the next post, we'll be going over saving, print previewing, printing, and exporting to PDF a document. Thanks for reading and I hope this helped!
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