How to Factory Reset LibreOffice [Complete Guide]

A complete guide to factory reset LibreOffice to its default state.

LibreOffice is a powerful and versatile open-source office suite that provides a free alternative to commercial software like Microsoft Office. While using LibreOffice, you may encounter issues or experience glitches that can disrupt your workflow. In such cases, a factory reset can often resolve these problems and restore LibreOffice to its default settings. In this comprehensive guide, we will walk you through how to factory reset LibreOffice, step by step.

Steps to factory reset LibreOffice

• Make sure to close all the running LibreOffice instances (such as Calc, Writer or Impress).
• Then, open any of the modules with a blank document (such as Writer or Calc).
• From the menu, click Help > Restart in Safe Mode. See Fig 1.
• On the confirmation window, click “Restart“.
• In the next safe mode pop-up screen, select the option Reset to factory settings. Then go ahead and select both "reset settings and user interface modification" and "reset entire user profile". See Fig 2.
• Click apply changes and restart. See Fig 2.
• That completes the steps to factory reset LibreOffice. Here are all the images from the above steps.

Additional steps based on the operating system

The above steps should be sufficient for a factory reset for Linux, Windows and macOS. However, when you use LibreOffice, there are various folders based on your own customization available inside a config folder.

To completely clean up LibreOffice, you may consider the following additional steps.

For GNU/Linux distributions, you need to delete the entire parent folder in your home directory. The folder name is:

~/.config/libreoffice

Copy the folder “libreoffice” to some safe place, just in case. Make sure to close all running instances of LibreOffice entirely before performing this step.

Open the location using any file manager and delete it. See Fig 3.

Now open LibreOffice, and you should be in the default state.

For Windows and Mac, use the below location to find the above folder and remove it after taking a backup.

• Windows:

C:\Users\<Your Username>\AppData\Roaming\LibreOffice

• Mac:

/Users/<Your Username>/Library/Application Support/LibreOffice

Wrapping up

After performing the factory reset, you may need to reconfigure specific preferences or customize LibreOffice according to your requirements. This includes setting your preferred language, enabling/disabling features, and adjusting the user interface.