Open Office, How to make it stop helping me?

[tashirosgt]

How do I turn off the auto formatting features in the Open Office document writer? If I am trying to type a list, I don't want to incorrectly anticipate me and start inserting its own numbers or letters. Also I don't want to change "2nd" to a two followed by "nd" in small superscripts.

[homey]

Go to Tools / AutoCorrect...
check in these tabs
Word Completion ( I turn that off )
Options ( I uncheck these )
Custom Quotes ( I turn these off )

Also, if you don't want that light bulb popping up all the time go to
Tools / Options...
in the General tab
[ ] Tips
[ ] Help Agent

[tashirosgt]

That you very much. Not being a heavy duty document designer, I can't help wondering if Open Office does these things by default since MS Word users expect these things to be turned on - or has Open Office taken the idea of "software knows best" farther than Microsoft?

[RahulSundaram]

Originally Posted by tashirosgt

That you very much. Not being a heavy duty document designer, I can't help wondering if Open Office does these things by default since MS Word users expect these things to be turned on - or has Open Office taken the idea of "software knows best" farther than Microsoft?

You can merely continue typing for many autocomplete features and ignore that. One of the primary Openoffice.org goals is to shorten the learning curve for users who have been using MS Office before so its quite natural that it does similar things and many users do find it useful. For rest of them, there are options to turn those features off.

Rahul
Red Hat

[tashirosgt]

I'm now trying to create a simple spread sheet and I find two more un-helpful helpful features.

First is the auto complete feature. The problem with "you can merely continue typing" is that the auto complete highlighting makes it hard to see what you are typing. When you are copying things like serial numbers you need to see what you are doing. Having an old serial number flash up when you are typing a different new one is like having an assistant who constantly suggests the wrong answers.

Second, when I try to delete the contents of a cell by using the the backspace key, I always get a pop-up window that asks me what I want to delete in the cell (strings? numbers? etc.) But I am entering names in the cells like MYMACHINE17L23 , which have both letters and numbers, so it is completely doofus to have this in operation.

[homey]

Go to Tools / AutoCorrect...
check in these tabs
Word Completion ( I turn that off )
Options ( I uncheck these )
Custom Quotes ( I turn these off )

Also, if you don't want that light bulb popping up all the time go to
Tools / Options...
in the General tab
[ ] Tips
[ ] Help Agent

Have another look at these. Word Completion can be turned of and turning off tips and help agent may solve the second problem.

[tashirosgt]

The "solution" to avoiding the pop-up menu that I found is to double-click the cell , a la windows.