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…”
- Select “Keyboard” tab
- Select “Delete” from the top listbox
- Select “Edit” from the bottom left listbox
- Select “Cut” from the bottom middle listbox
- Click “Modify” button
- “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.
Comments 5
Hey, thanks man! You just saved me a lot of work, not to mention nerves at seeing the damned popup again and again! I need to delete some 2800 entries in a table manually, one by one, after checking each one off against another list. I think you can imagine what difference your article makes
Posted 18 Jan 2011 at 5:17 pm ¶@Johnny
Posted 18 Jan 2011 at 6:16 pm ¶Thanks for leaving a comment, glad to be of assistance.
I’ve only been using openoffice for a few days, but I’ve already had enough to go searching for a cure. Thanks for taking the time to post your findings.
Posted 01 Dec 2011 at 2:47 am ¶hi golond, thanks for reading.
I have moved to LibreOffice since they forked. Imho, LibreOffice was not “as pretty as OpenOffice” (put those in quotes because this is just my impression after I used both), but LibreOffice did solved some of these quirks.
For this instance, It has a saner key assignment by default, where delete key is “clear content” and backspace brings up the “Delete Content” dialogbox.
Posted 01 Dec 2011 at 12:26 pm ¶THANK YOU!
Posted 18 Mar 2013 at 12:00 am ¶Post a Comment