Make Office Better

Stop Libreoffice’s ‘recover’ prompts

If you’re working in Libreoffice and your computer crashes, the next time you run the program it will offer to recover your unsaved work. While sometimes handy, declining the offer takes three individual clicks, which can soon get annoying. To avoid this, you can disable this prompt (while keeping the saving process enabled), then turn it back on when you actually want to recover a document.

To do so, click Start, then type writer. Libreoffice Writer should appear in the results. Right-click it, then select ‘Open file location’ and a File Explorer window containing shortcuts to all Libreoffice programs will appear. In our example, we’re changing the options in Writer, so right-click the

Writer shortcut, then select Properties and make sure the Shortcut tab is selected. To prevent the documentrecovery window appearing, we need to add an extra command to the shortcut. In the Target section, click the very end of the box so that the cursor sits after the final double quote mark, then add a space, followed by --norestore (see screenshot). The full shortcut should now read “C:\program Files\ Libreoffice\program\swriter. exe” --norestore (the folder location will vary depending on where Libreoffice is installed on your PC). Next, click OK. Repeat this process in other Libreoffice programs to stop their prompts.

If your computer crashes and you want to recover a document, follow this process, but this time remove ‘--norestore’ from the shortcut. Once you’ve done that, restart Libreoffice and the Document Recovery window will appear as before.