Dear Open Office

[rolanni]

What in Ghu's Name were you thinking when you decided that it would be Cool and Useful to hang a macro to draw a heavy line on the following sequence of keystrokes: three asterisks and a return

I mean, nobody would ever actually want three asterisks centered on a line, right?

Comments

[difrancis.livejournal.com]

And so it becomes . . . asterisk, space, asterisk, space, asterisk. Don't they know that they're wearing out your fingers and you need them for writing?

Di

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Oh, I think I know this one. I believe they copied that from M$ Word, where it is also a default. And somewhere in the options you can turn the thing off. Hopefully.

[moon-happy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this one bit me, too! You at least figured out what was going on. I ended up sending the file to an expert friend, who was able to get rid of the lines. If you find a new way to center the asterisks, do let me know.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

Well, in Open Office, what you do to get rid of the macro is to drop down the Format menu and uncheck AutoFormat. Mind you, that turns off all of the autoformatting, but it's worth it not to have the damn' lines. IMHO. I'm assuming that there has to be a similar way to turn off this "feature" in Word.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

I had that happen not long ago, too. A quick-and-dirty fix someone told me when I complained about it in another venue is to cut and paste the document into Notepad (or whatever Open Office's equivalent is), then back into your regular word processor. It strips all the formatting, but hey, sometimes you've got to do what you've got to do.

Turn off the formatting options first, though.

Even asterisk, space, asterisk, space, asterisk doesn't always prevent this from happening, because that's always been my default and it still did it to me twice. And if you use a keyboard emulator (I have an Alphasmart -- www.alphasmart.com), there's no way to catch it in mid-upload and do the necessary backspacing to make it Quit That.

My sympathies...