This tutorial would help you tweak some settings of Writer to save the last cursor position.
If you are an author or writer – you may be writing long documents over time, and when the document is beginning to become huge, it is sometimes helpful to have the cursor position saved and close the document so that you can come back to the position later on and resume your work.
Unfortunately, this is not enabled by default in Writer. Here’s how you can save the cursor position.
Table of Contents
Steps to Save the Last Cursor Position in Writer
- Open the document for which you want to enable the settings.
- Press Alt+F12 Or click from menu Tools > Options
- In the options window, under LibreOffice, click user data. And enter your first name in the first text box.
- Press OK.
- From menu, click, File > Properties.
- In the properties window, click on the General tab, check Apply User Data and click Reset Properties. [Reset properties will remove the created, modified fields of the current document.]
- Save the document after putting the mouse cursor where you want it to be next time.
- Close the document.
Now, open the document and see the cursor at the last saved position.
Update: If you do not see the cursor at the last saved position after following the above steps, use SHIFT+F5 from the keyboard. This should put the cursor in the previous position.
Summary
This is how you can enable Writer to save the last cursor position in LibreOffice Writer. However, please note that you must do it for each document if you want this result. I found no global option that can set this in the LibreOffice Writer profile.
Drop a comment below if you have any questions.
Troubleshooting and Usage Notes
- Many users reported that this would only work with Open Document Formats (*.odt) and not in Microsoft Word formats (*.docx). If that is the case, a workaround would be to write your documents in *.odt format and, finally, when completed, save it as *.docx.
- You can also use SHIFT+F5 to put the cursor in the previous position.
- If you are using LibreOffice 7.1.1 series and working on a long document – then it might not work properly. A bug report is present here.