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Okay, these days, collaboration is only a Google Drive or Office 365 account away. After all, cloud services were created with the idea that collaboration should be simple. 

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To that end, both services have made it incredibly easy to work with others.

However, there may be times when you don't want to use third-party services for collaboration. You might have highly sensitive data in files that you can't or don't want to trust to a third party. For those instances, you might want to keep that data housed within your network and on your desktops or servers. 

This might lead you to create shared folders that can be accessed from various machines on your network. 

Also: The best collaboration apps: Top team tools

One lesser-known feature found in LibreOffice is the Remote Save feature. With this option, you can save a file to a remote service (such as an SSH server or a Windows Share). There are other options (such as Google Drive) but some of them have been broken for a very long time and show no signs of being fixed. However, the Windows Share feature works very well.

Let me show you how to use it.

How to save a file from LibreOffice to a remote shared folder on your network

1. Create a new service

The first thing you must do is set up a new service. Open LibreOffice Writer and click File > Save Remote. From the Manage Service drop-down, click Add Service.

Adding a new managed remote save service in LibreOffice.

Image: Jack Wallen

Also: How to install the free MS Office alternative, LibreOffice, on MacOS

2. Configure the Windows Share save

From the Type drop-down, select Windows Share, and then configure the necessary options, which are:

• Host: The IP address of your Windows Share on the remote machine.
• Share: The name of the share on the remote machine.
• User: Your valid username on the Windows Share host.
• Password: The password for your user on the remote machine.
• Label: A human-readable name for the share.
• Root: Leave blank.

After configuring the share, click OK and you're ready.

Configuring a Windows Share as a remote save service in LibreOffice.

Image: Jack Wallen

3. Authenticate with your remote share password

When you now go to share a file to the remote Windows share, you'll be prompted for your remote user password for the share. 

Once you authenticate with your remote password, you can save to the remote share.

Image: Jack Wallen

And that's all there is to configuring LibreOffice to save files to a remote Windows share. If you only have that one remote service configured, every time you go to do a Remote Save, you'll automatically be prompted to enter your credentials for the remote share, and the save will work seamlessly. 

Also: How to back up your files in Windows 10 and 11 with File History

One thing to keep in mind is that you can configure multiple remote save services. If you do that, when you go to save remotely, you'll be prompted to select the service you want to use. Other than that, this feature should be as simple as saving a file to your local drive.

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