This advanced tutorial will explain how to suppress or clear out the recent document list in LibreOffice.
This method applies to all LibreOffice suite of components (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw etc.).
Suppose you are a professional LibreOffice user and work daily with sensitive or critical documents in your organization in a shared system. In that case, you might want to suppress/delete the recent documents list after your work is done.
Also, you might not want to show the other user the documents you opened. LibreOffice’s recent document list holds 25 last-used records, including its path by default.
If you want to suppress the list, you have to change some advanced settings, and there will not be any record of the documents you are working on if you follow the below steps.
WARNING: Once you clear/delete the recent document list using the below steps, it is permanently deleted from all components Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math, and Base. Even if you undo the below changes, your recent document list will not be back.
Table of Contents
Steps to Suppress Recent Document List
Easy Method (LibreOffice 7.0+ and above only)
LibreOffice 7.0+ made removing or cleaning up the recent document list easy. It’s available on the menu itself.
Open any LibreOffice document (e.g. spreadsheet or document). Then navigate to File > Recent Documents. In the end, you should see an option “Clear List”. Click on that to clear the list.
If you want to remove specific entries from the recent document list, you need to open the Start Center, the main LibreOffice window.
Here, you can click the small cross icon against the recent document to remove them one by one.
Advanced Method (Should work in all versions)
- Go to Tools > Options or press ALT+F12.
- On the left side, under LibreOffice, click Advanced. Click Open Expert Configuration.
- On the Expert Configuration Window, type picklist and click search. PickListSize property holds a number of files to be stored as history, which we will make zero.
- Select PickListSize and click Edit. On the edit window, change the value to 0. You can check the PickListSize value is zero. Click OK and close all dialog.
- Now you can go back and check all recent document list is cleared and its empty!
You can suppress the recent document list in LibreOffice using the above two methods.
Summary
Though this process is a bit tricky and uses tweaking of some advanced settings; However, this method can be helpful on many occasions.
Drop a comment below if you have any questions. You might want to check out other writer tutorials and tips.
Is it possible to right-click a file then an option to remove from the list, similar to windows suggestion to remove a recently used file (the shortcut), that should be easier and can do selective removal of certain file(s).
No. That feature to be provided by the OS, not the application.
The bottom of the recent menu has a “Clear List” entry on it. (7.0.4.2).
It does not show in the menu, if you have no documents open, but it does when you have a document open. In the “start center” screen, you can hover over the individual documents,and click X in the upper right corner to remove individual documents.
Thanks for the info. I was not aware of it. I have re-structured the entire article. Thanks again.
My Recent Document List keeps getting cleared with updates. I have literally lost files because of this.
Are you using Windows or Linux?
I’m using Windows 10. This is something that’s only started happening recently. Any ideas about what’s happening and if there is anything I can do about it?
Thanks a lot. I think that keeping large list of recent documents with thumbnail images is security/privacy risk.