With autocomplete, OpenOffice has managed to make a completely useless, very annoying behavior default. They've also done a good job of hiding the menu options to disable the "feature," and have hidden it in different places in different tools. This is a case where consistency would reduce the impact of a stupid default.
Anyhow, as others have mentioned, whenever I'm using a freshly-installed OpenOffice (e.g., after installing a hopefully less-buggy version of Ubuntu), OpenOffice reminds me how much I dislike this "feature." And I spend too much time hunting down how to kill it.
First, in OO Writer it's not really that well hidden. Copied from http://nowacki.org/blog/2004/05/disable_autocomplete_in_openoffice.html:
* Tools -> AutoCorrect/AutoFormat…
* Word Completion tab
* Uncheck “Enable word completion”
Unfortunately, this doesn't disable the "feature" in OO Calc, and the OO Calc option is very well hidden. Today I really was having trouble figuring it out--it is, of course, not in what passes for help in OO--which led me to nowacki.org via Google. From their blog entry:
Tools -> Cell Contents -> AutoInput
Of course, this is the root of the problem: we're supposed to magically know that in OO Calc they call it autoinput rather than autocomplete. What, if anything, are the OO folks thinking?
This has been a usability problem and unnecessary time sink for a lot of people for a long time now. When will they disable it by default, or at least make it possible to find the option in OO Calc? Or maybe talk about disabling it in OO Help?
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
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6 comments:
oops - truncated. I thought I'd typed:
"Thanks - I was going nuts"
I have no reason to believe you're the one who's nuts.
OOffice Community is learning from Microsoft: they are filling OO of stupid & time wasting functionalities which require hours (days) to know how to disable them. There is a ever lasting law in software engineering that says: "when your software has become perfect, after years and years of development, it starts becoming worse". This is because software engineers do not know what to add, after all is well working, so they go for not useful, time wasting, annoying automatic functions, thinking the computer has a brain or their product can become intelligent. Whenever software has automatic functions to help us thinking it turns into a machine which makes our life worse compared to when such software was not used by us. OpenOffice, born and raised to be a free software to make us free from imposed commands and unwanted and fake benefits, is day by day becoming that "big brother" that had to be by Open Office once destroyed.
I agree that software tends to get worse over time, though I'm not sure I agree with your reasons. I think it's more a desire to be all things to all people, with a dose of whoever's in charge not understanding the problem that's being, hopefully, solved. Thus, OO starts as a good idea and becomes bloatware. Linux starts as a good idea, but then, developed by people who don't understand Unix, morphs into something more and more like Windows.
Thank you! This is indeed a completely useless, time wasting feature, and I couldn't find any information in the help file on how to disable it. You have saved me a lot of time.
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