[feature-request] LibreOffice Viewer (Windows)

This month, Microsoft will deprecate their Office viewer tools. They haven’t been updated in forever. And there are several use-cases for Office viewers. I was wondering if this is a consideration for LibreOffice going forward. Would a LibreOffice developer care to estimate how difficult an undertaking this would be? If nobody else is interested in this, I might have to take a crack at it.

Why wasting effort on a “viewer” when we offer fully functional suite for free?

For systems intended only for viewing documents, not modifying them. In my line of work, this a use-case. Government, military, and business have been using the the Microsoft Office Viewers for quite a while. Most employees don’t know how to protect or set read only. And when it is later displayed, it’s nice to display a document in a presentation room or on a display without any of the toolbars, etc.

If there was a button in LibreOffice that disables editing like opening a read only file…

…And hide the toolbars/ribbon until button is pressed again. That would be fantastic. A way to toggle this setting by default would be awesome.

Like Edit-Edit Mode (Ctrl+Shift+M)?

The command parameter “–view” seemed to do the trick. Though the banner that opens (“This document is open in read-only mode”) is pretty frustrating because for my use-case as the user shouldn’t be informed they have editing privileges. Is there a way to prevent this banner?

Feature Requests can be submitted here https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/?enhancement=yes

  1. Create a Bugzilla account.
  2. Select FILE A BUG.
  3. Select LIBREOFFICE.
  4. Fill in the details of what you’d like to see.
  5. Under Severity choose “Enhancement”.

Consider designing an extension with that functionality. Then only the people who want it will have to download it.

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