Hi guys, I am experiencing a very strange and really annoying problem. Basically the combination alt tab doesn't seem to pick up anymore opened open office documents. I rely on the alt tab to switch quickly between application and for watherver reason it is not working anymore. The problem seems to be happening only with open office, other applications are fine.
So, here's the thing: I open an office document and say I use alt tab to switch to the browser, when try to switch back to the open document it isn't not in the list of icons that alt tab brings back. To go back to it, I have to reopen it again. Very odd. Does anybody know how to get around it? It started to happen today just after an update
I have ubuntu 12.04 on a dell xps 17 machine.
Not sure whether this is relevant or not but a few days ago I disabled my Nvidia drivers but noticed no problem whatsoever till today
I hope somebody can help because this is driving me crazy
cheers

Not sure if it's related to an update; I think it's standard Unity behavior.

I'm not sure if I can explain it clearly.

With only two documents open (and no other applications), <alt><tab> works straight away. With multiple documents open (and/or other applications), you have to keep <alt><tab> pressed if there are multiple options for an application (e.g. writer documents, terminals). After a few seconds, the selected application in the 'select' window will expand and you can use arrow keys to select the document (or another terminal in my case).

I personally find it a bit annoying, but that is how it is with Unity (as far as I know).

Hi Wim Sturkenboom I know it works like that...the problem is that I don't even get that, simply the office documents are not there at all as if they weren't open, and without alt-tab I can't get them back, I have to reopen them, and they pop back up.

Done a bit of research because nobody seems to know much about that and I came across this https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ce/+bug/896608
I tried these two commands, whatever they do,
and touch wood it seems to work for the time being, but I am not sure whether this is a permanent fix or not. The reason why I associated this behaviour with an update, it's because it started doing this pretty much after I run the update, never seen this behaviour before in ubuntu. ANy idea what it could be?

What it does is basically refresh of a shortcut (symbolic link).

The first command (rm) removes /usr/bin/libreoffice; this might have been the application or a shortcut to the application or to an old version of the application (difficult to say afterwards).
The second command created a shortcut with the name libreoffice in the directory /usr/bin/; the shortcut points to /usr/lib/libreoffice/program/soffice.bin. The shortcut is what is used to start libreoffice.

I ran the above two commands on my system that does not have issues. The first command tells us which command is executed when libreoffice is started. The second command shows that the first command is a shortcut (symbolic link) to another program. And the result matches the second command that you have executed.

PS
Sorry for misunderstanding your original question.

thanks for that and the explanation. SO we don't really know what could have caused the issue?

No problem at all, I probably wasn't clear enough : - )!