How To Import and Use Microsoft Excel Templates on LibreOffice Calc

December 7, 2022

This tutorial will help you be more productive with LibreOffice Calc by taking benefit of the existing, thousands of Microsoft Excel’s templates on the internet. Thanks to LibreOffice compatibility features, this is possible. With this, you can quickly make invoices, receipts, project management, budget plans, financial reports, bookkeeping, teacher/student records and many more. Let’s try now!

(A budget plan spreadsheet from Vertex42.com opened in Calc)

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About

We started a LibreOffice class in Indonesia this year 2022 and we tried hard to give everything useful for students, especially, using Excel templates in Calc. This is a good idea to boost up your productivity at your work. We hope this inspires everyone to create, share and enrich LibreOffice Writer templates more and more.

Warning about licenses: even though you can download a lot of templates gratis, and use them for personal purposes, you might be not permitted to use some for commercial purposes by their authors. For that reason, always check the license of every single template before reusing and resharing it. As a solution, it is better if you could find templates with free as in freedom licenses such as cc by-sa (license used by all Wikipedia pages) or in public domain or even better make them yourself. Trying out many templates will give you the ability to do so in Calc.

What you can create

Calendars
InvoicesReceipts
Pay slips
Gantt charts
Schedules Forms
Budget planningFinancial reports (balance sheets)
Project managements
Project dashboards
Student grade booksStudent score cards
Student/employee attendances
and many more…

Resources

Below is a list of gratis (free of cost) Microsoft Excel template websites. They altogether provide the world most complete digital spreadsheet templates for all purposes possible including invoices, project management, pivot tables, academic records, and many more.

businessaccountingbasics.co.uk

double-entry-bookkeeping.com

Document Format

xls : Excel 97-2003 old format.

xlsx : Excel 2007-365 new format.

xslt : Excel template format.

ods : Calc format.

ots : Calc template format, equivalent to xlst.

You can use whatever Excel/Calc format available without problems. However, the difference between normal formats (xlsx, ods) with template formats (xltx, ots) is that:

1) if you open the file, normal one will show its actual file name on titlebar while template one will show Untitled, and,

2) if you edited them, saving a normal one will change its content while saving a template one will create a new file without changing the original content.

Expected Goals

If you pay attention closely, you will notice that LibreOffice Calc comes with no template at all. With this tutorial, your Calc should improve from that to having a lot of templates you can use for real work purposes.

Before:

After:

Process

1. Get an Excel template document file.

You can search, find, visit and download them from any of resources above.

2. Open LibreOffice Calc.

3. Open the Excel document.

4. Document opened.

5. Do File > Templates > Save as Template > give it a name according to its original name > select My Templates category > Save > successfully imported a template. For further explanation, read our LibreOffice Templates Use Guide.

6. To use a template, do File > New > Templates > template chooser dialog will show > select a template > Open > a new untitled document with template will show > you are ready to write. Please read LibreOffice Templates Use Guide if you want to learn more.

6. To import another template, repeat steps number 1-5.

Template Examples

Calc Calendar

This is a 2023 calendar published by Calendarpedia.com.

Calc Invoice

This is an invoice template published by invoicesimple.com.

Calc Budget Planner

This is a sophisticated family budget calculation, plan and report spreadsheet from Vertex42.com.

Calc Pay Slip

This is an employee pay slip template published by Vertex42. You can use this for your employees if you are managing a company / store.

Example Project Management Gantt Chart

This is a project management with Gantt Chart published by Vertex42.

Calc Financial Report / Balance Sheet

This is a financial report (balance sheet) published by Vertex42.

Calc Money Management

This is a money management with accounting and report included from Vertex42.

Calc Bookkeeping

This is an accounting journal published by SmartSheet.com.

Calc Project Dashboard

This is a useful project portfolio dashboard with data and various charts from SmartSheet.

Calc Student Attendance Book

This is a template for teacher to record their student attendance at school by XLTemplates.org.

Calc Student Gradebook and Score Card

This is a student score record, grades, and school report card for parents in one template published by ExcelDataPro.com.

References

What is LibreOffice?

LibreOffice Templates Download Center

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