chewearn's blog

I have been using OpenOffice Calc a lot and one annoyance I faced is the “Delete Contents” dialogbox. In the beginning, I tolerated this quirk of the program, but after more than a year of clicking “Delete all” checkbox followed by “OK” button, I have had enough.

Setting aside the question why this idiotic feature is the way it is, I did a thorough Google search and came up with some findings.

Apparently in OpenOffice Calc, the Delete and Backspace keys are swapped when compared to MS-Office Excel. I don’t have a copy of Excel to check this, so I can’t confirm this statement.

However, this is the fact about OpenOffice Calc. The Delete key brings up the said dialogbox. The Backspace key execute a delete “text, number, etc” without bugging you with a dialogbox. But here is the kicker: the Backspace key does not remove custom formatting on the cell. In other words, if you have the cell set to “Bold + red fonts”, this custom formatting remained unchanged by the Backspace key.

And there is no other delete related function/key that would execute a “Delete all” in a single key press. Or is there?

Workaround

Well, I did finally discover a workaround. The “Edit > Cut” function would removed everything from the cell. So, the next step is to mapped this function to the Delete key.

From the Calc menu, select: “Tool > Customize…”

1. Select “Keyboard” tab
2. Select “Delete” from the top listbox
3. Select “Edit” from the bottom left listbox
4. Select “Cut” from the bottom middle listbox
5. Click “Modify” button
6. “Delete” appears in the bottom right listbox

And you are done. Now, pressing “Delete” key is equivalent to “Edit > Cut”, which effectively is a “Delete all” action.