I’m running LibreOffice 26.2.0.3 on MacOS 15.5. I only use Calc; all the other components of LibreOffice came along for the ride. I recently rebooted the Mac with an unknown number of Calc spreadsheets open, possibly zero. The Mac was told to reopen any windows it had open at reboot.
I wound up with one LibreOffice window, inviting me to select from 14 document choices. Two of those on the first screen of choices have identical names, though the images are different. None of the names include the file extensions, so odds are that’s the actual difference between the two files. Many of the choices have not been opened for weeks.
This contrasts sharply with a reboot on Kubuntu, possibly with a slightly different (earlier?) version of LibreOffice. In that case I definitely had at least 3 calc spreadsheets open at the reboot, though all had been saved since I last modified them. In that case I got a suggestion that I “recover” 5 spread sheets, including the 3 I knew had been open. That was a bit weird, given that I’d saved them, but at least comprehensible.
What happened on the Mac? Is this the screen I’d have gotten if I’d launched LibreOffice manually? Does it remember what files were open on the Mac, as it seems to on Linux, or is this just a hard to understand list of “recent” documents, with their extensions unaccountably concealed? (Reading the screen itself, I’d think it was a list of all documents, much like I’d have gotten from the Finder (aka File app) or ls ~/Documents, perhaps including only files with extensions LibreOffice believes it can understand. It’s not that - if I scroll down below the image I uploaded, I get a document named “Sheet 1-Table 1” - there’s certainly no such file in ~/Documents.)
And most importantly - are there configuration options to have it (a) show file extensions (b) remember/tell me what files it had open (c) limit its idea of “recent” to match my own idea of “recent” (d) lose the images entirely, and give me a selection list similar to the Finder, where 14 choices will fit on a single screen without scrolling?
[Edited to add: as I suspected, this screen is indeed what I get if I launch LibreOffice without specifying a file to open. I’ve also discovered that you can sometimes get the full name of the file as a tooltip, if you do the right thing. This includes the file’s full path.
This solved the mystery of Sheet 1 - Table 1 Its full path is ~/Documents/Borrowed Books/Sheet 1-Table 1.csv That file does not currently exist in the file system. So what I’m looking at is a list of “recent” spreadsheets that doesn’t check whether the file still exists in the file system. Worse, perhaps, is that LibreOffice retains enough information about the deleted file to show a large Thumbnail with readable partial contents.
So now I have another question: under what conditions does LibreOffice retain information the user has deleted? Is there a way to guarantee that LibreOffice no longer retains any copy of sensitive information that may once have resided within a LibreOffice document that’s since been deleted? ]
