You have probably used the LibreOffice suite (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw,…) but, do you know LibreOffice includes a command-line tool called ‘soffice’ (or ‘libreoffice’) with which you can perform useful tasks with LibreOffice-compatible documents in a quick and easy way?

Table of Contents

soffice/libreoffice

You may find on your system an executable called soffice and other called libreoffice. libreoffice is just an alias for soffice.

$ ls -l `which libreoffice`
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 36 oct 13 17:15 /usr/bin/libreoffice -> /usr/lib/libreoffice/program/soffice

Open a file using the GUI

soffice <file>

Starts with a new document

# Calc
soffice --calc

# Writer
soffice --writer

# Impress
soffice --impress

# Draw
soffice --draw

# Base
soffice --base

# Math
soffice --math

# HTML document
soffice --web

Output the content of a text file

soffice --cat <file>

Convert a document file to PDF

soffice --convert-to pdf <file>
  • --convert-to pdf:writer_pdf_Export: convert using the settings on the PDF export dialog.
  • --out-dir <path>: define an output folder (by default, the current folder is used).

Convert a spreadsheet file to CSV

soffice --convert-to csv <file>
  • --out-dir <path>: define an output folder (by default, the current folder is used).
soffice --pt <printer name> <file>

# Use the default printer
soffice -p <file>

Open an Impress file in Presentation mode

soffice --show <file>

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