Saving To An External Drive. How Do I Do It?

[Smallwheels]

In Ubuntu I could just go to Save As and I would get a dialog box from Ubuntu and I could put the file anywhere. I switched to Elementary OS this week and I downloaded the newest version of Libre Office available in the repository. It is version 3.5.7.2. When I go to save a document I must use the controls on top of Libre Office. On Ubuntu they were on the menu bar at the top of the screen. In Elementary all program controls are within the programs window.

So I click File and go to Save As. It opens a gray dialog box that looks like it came from an old Windoz ME machine. It is different from the Elementary OS dialog box. In this box I should be able to choose where to send the file. I can do that but there is no selection available to put it into my connected external hard drive. All I can select are the folders within the machine. None of my external drives are visible.

If I just click the Save button it sends the file to the Documents folder in my Home folder. To move it I must open my external drive’s folder in a separate window and drag the file to the correct folder within it. This is really annoying. Is there a fix for this or is this a bug? I want to be able to save files directly to a location on my external hard drive. Please help. Thank you.

[petermau]

I would normally expect to use the Save As option to save the file into another folder on whichever media I want. Do you thing you may have an properties problem on your Elementary system an you are unable to write to the media? Have you tried > Save As a Copy as an alternative?

What settings do you have in your > Options > Paths > My Documents which is used for the default folder to use for your documents.?

LibreOffice 3.5.7.2 is rather old. There are a number of articles on the net on how to update LibreO on a Elementary system to 4.1 (the current version) of 4.2 for the adventurous. For example Installing “LibreOffice 4.1 in Elementary OS | Zaron’s Blog”
Sorry not to help further but I suspect the problem may be in your Elementary system setup. I cannot reproduce your problem on my Ubuntu system.

[Smallwheels]

I have no idea how to find out how Elementary works with saving files for Libre Office. It seems to work fine for other programs.

Since posting this I have removed Libre Office 3.5.7.2 and installed 4.2.2.1. It is different. I can save new files to my external drive. The only problem is that it now freezes when trying to save files. I’ll be asking about this soon if I can’t debug it. While searching for others with this problem it seems Libre Office freezes for many people.