We are using Ubuntu 11.10 in the office. Opening and saving a document to the home drive works well.
If you need to open a document located in a folder on a network server, you firstly find that there is no obvious support in LibreOffice for browsing a network. To get around this, I created a bookmark using the “Places” application that comes with Ubuntu. This then appears in the LibreOffice file opening dialogue. Using the bookmark, it is possible to browse to a document but when the document is selected and the “Open” button is clicked, the browse window closes to return back to LibreOffice but the page in LibreOffice remains blank.
This happens on two machines running Ubuntu 11.10. We used to be able to open documents on a network share with 11.04 (I think!).
I downloaded directly from the LibreOffice site, the latest stable version of LibreOffice, (3.5 - The one provided by Ubuntu 11.10 is LibreOffice 3.4.4
OOO340m1 (Build:402)). I installed that. This did not solve the problem.
I then loaded the latest Mint distribution onto another computer. It, too, has the same problem. At that point I thought I should report this in the hope of being helpful.
I have also performed the following experimentation to try to identify the nature of this problem and to see if I was possibly doing something wrong or omitting something.
Using “Places” I browsed to a document on the network, right-clicked on it and selected “Open with LibreOffice Writer” from the context box. The document opens perfectly. I then altered the document slightly and saved it. It seemed to save perfectly. I then opened the document, using “Places” again. The changes had been saved. I then altered the document again and tried to perform a “Save As”, saving the document with a slightly different name. This gave rise to the error, “Error saving document [name of document]: General Error. General input/output error.”
Using “Places” I navigated to a document on a network share, opened it, altered it, saved it, and then closed the document. I then selected “File, Open” in LibreOffice and noted that the document was listed in the “Recent documents”. I clicked on that item in the list and the document opened. When hovering over the item in the “Recent documents” list, I noted that the path was shown as /home/[name of user]/.gvfs/[sharename on servername]/[folder name]/[document name].
I have the feeling that there might be some sort of disconnect between Open Office working with the Gnome virtual file system and the link provided by the bookmark. I note that in the package there is an LibreOffice Gnome Integration Module but wonder if it is working properly with the latest distribution of Ubuntu.
As a final experiment, I selected “Tools/Options” in LibreOffice Writer. Then selected “LibreOffice/Paths/My Documents”. I clicked on the Edit Button and this took me to a browse. By clicking on the “Enter as a Name” Icon in the top left hand corner of the browse dialog, I was presented with an input field. As I typed in the path, it helpfully filled in the remainder. Once the path was properly defined, I selected “OK”. The path that was originally in the My Documents path specification remained unchanged. If I selected the path using the browse without typing in the path, the My Documents path specification goes blank. When I type in a path without the .gvfs, that is on my computer’s diskdrive, the specification works and is displayed correctly in the My Documents path.
I promote the use of Open Source Software to businesses. Being able to create, save, open, alter and save edited documents over a network is quite an important feature. As a suggestion, it would be good if, in the OpenOffice browse, there was a button to look at the network just as there is in “Places”. It would also be good if it were possible to alter document and folder names as one can do in Windows and Microsoft Office rather than having to go back to “Places” for this functionality.
I hope this is helpful to someone.