LibreOffice: Opening Templates Slows Computer Down to a Crawl (FIXED)

Post date: Oct 28, 2013 5:46:43 PM
OS: Linux
Distribution: Linuxmint 13

Yesterday I was setting up Linux Mint 13 for for a friend on a new computer. Everything went smoothly until I tried to demo how to use the templates in LibreOffice. When I click to open a template, LibreOffice would freeze and dragged the computer to a crawl. I later found out that it was a simple fix.... once I found out the problem. This is why I am sharing this here in hopes it may help others.

First of all I did a quick check to see what was happening to the system and saw that soffice.bin was taking over 600 MB of the RAM. And this was with a empty document. I then quickly killed it and looked for my Template folder and was unable to find it. I was suspecting that it's non-existence may the root of my problem. My search was based on my personal memory of the path for OpenOffice. My OpenOffice always stored the templates nested in a .openoffice/ folder in my home folder. (Note the period/dot in front. This tells the system to normally hide it.) . I reopened LibreOffice and Click on File -> Templates -> Organize and again it reacted negatively. Again I killed the program and retried with File -> Templates -> Edit and this time it did not hang.

A dialog box popped up with the path to my templates being nested in .config/libreoffice/ within my home folder. I then surfed to that location and did see that the Template folder did exist but was empty.

So I grabbed a template from another computer and place it there in the folder as my first step of a process of elimination. Ran another test and again the same results.

I then went back in LibreOffice to look at the configuration. I begin to think maybe the path was set to the wrong location. I clicked on Tools -> Options then selected LibreOffice in the menu on the left. This dropped opened a tree with Paths which I then selected. This opened a menu on the right titled Paths used in LibreOffice I selected Templates and thee click Edit.

This opened a new window with a list of three paths for Templates.

I then surfed to the first two and discovered they did not exist. The third was the one was I mention before that did exist. So I deleted the first two paths from the configuration, and this corrected the problem. I then downloaded several templates, created folders to categorize them into categories like Business, Contracts, Letters etc. Everything is working well on my friend's computer now.

NOTE: I blurred my friend's name in the paths out of respect for his privacy.