OpenOffice: Disabling Useless Annoying Popups

OpenOffice has this annoying feature that when the mouse pointer is over a table or a list a popup pops up to obscure what you're working on. Today I had two documents open in side-by-side windows and the table popup obscured the other window. Popups are easy to disable in web browsers, so why not in office tools?

How to: whenever one of these popups appears, look at View|Toolbars and uncheck the offending tool bar.

OpenOffice Inserting Page Breaks

I've been using OpenOffice more than usual lately (and still greatly prefer emacs/LaTeX for speed and accuracy). One annoyance has been inserting page breaks: Insert|Manual Break|Page Break. Very clumsy and slow. There's no hint regarding an equivalent shortcut adjacent to the menu item, so I tried ^L--it is the standard ASCII page break character--but no joy. Googling led to http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=35045, where Bhikkhu Pesala suggests ^enter (or control enter for newbs). Thanks Bhikku.

Removing a menu item in Xfce4.6.1

I recently uninstalled gnumeric, but the menu entry didn't go away. Looking through various menu items, settings, configuration options, etc., didn't yield anything. The online documentation for xfce 4.6 has the helpful statement that there is no documentation, and refers us to the xfce 4.2 documentation. I noticed in the same place that there was a link to 4.4 documentation, but no dice--that also refers us to the 4.2 docs. Clearly documentation has been a continuing issue in xfce. The 4.2 documentation led me to a page of misinformation (maybe it was accurate in 4.2), http://www.xfce.org/documentation/4.2/manuals/xfdesktop. This page shows an image of an "Edit Desktop Menu" button in the desktop settings window. There is no such button in 4.6.

A little googling led me to a lot of people asking how to do it, some suggestions that didn't work, etc. This reminded me of trying to get OpenOffice to stop "helpfully" suggesting word completions and spreadsheet cell contents: many complaints about how stupid the default settings were, many complaints about how difficult it was to disable, but solutions were few and far between.

Finally, fed up with trying to figure out how to do it the right away, I removed /usr/share/applications/gnumeric.desktop (actually I moved it to a safe place just in case) and, voila, the gnumeric menu item was gone.

Xubuntu Glitch

This morning I opened an open office document by clicking on it in Thunar (xfce's file manager), and the formatting was all goofed up. Weird. I started to mess around with it, but quickly realized the save as menu was different as well, and then noticed I was in Abiword, not Open Office.

For some reason, Xubuntu, which is supposed to be stripped to mostly essentials, ships with Abiword, Gnumeric, and some other useless crap. I hadn't gotten around to uninstalling these, because the clutter they were adding to my Office menu was a minor inconvenience. But now they're gone, kind of.

Removing Gnumeric didn't remove it from the office menu, so I'll have to figure out how to remove it manually, which isn't an obviously simple task in xfce.

Thew and Fro

Spell checkers allow users to add words to their dictionaries. It would be nice if they would also allow users to subtract words. Two frequent typos of mine are 'thew' for 'the' and 'fro' for 'for'. Unfortunately, both typos are English words, though neither is a word I use at all often. Almost always when either occurs in my writing it's a typo. So why can't I tell ispell or Open Office or Firefox or Thunderbird that these are words that should be flagged as misspellings? Actually, I could write a postprocessor for LaTeX documents that flags likely typos, but it would be harder to do this for a clumsier tool, like the WYSIWYG tools. Also this points out a problem with non-text-based tools for text-based applications. A postprocessor would work fine for text files, which means it would be more widely applicable than to just LaTeX, but every GUI has its own spell checker, with its own dictionary, and so they don't integrate well with each other, with simple tools, etc. Going back to elm or mutt for e-mail would solve part of this problem, by raising my productivity for basic e-mail by allowing the editing of e-mail in emacs, but they make multimedia e-mail a bit more of a challenge. OTOH, perhaps they've improved attachment handling in the past few years--worth a look.

OpenOffice Calc 2.4.1 Read Only Mode

As long as I'm on the topic, another aspect of OO 2.4.1 Calc that can only be considered a bug is that when one opens a spreadsheet in read-only mode, it's not possible to select and copy parts of a formula from the formula box. The closest one can come, so far as I can tell, is to copy the entire formula out of a cell. Why can't I copy read-only text? This is a copy I'm trying to do, not a cut, not a modification.

Disabling OpenOffice's Stupid Autocomplete

[ An updated version of this information appears here. ]

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?