It doesn't know what I'm trying to say, so why does it feel the need to try to predict the rest of every word I start to type in?!?

I'm looking at the screen, typing away, mention the word "declarations" and the computer pauses for a half second after i've typed in the first three letters, and suggests that i want to write December?!?

Anyone know how to turn this off? I'm finding it extremely irritating..

James

Tools - AutoCorrect/AutoFormat - Word Completion tab

Clear the 'enable word completion' box.

AAhh... Brilliant.. Thankyou..

Why on earth do they leave such a bizarre option on by default?

James

At the start, it is shocking, but if you are typing a long article with eyes on screen, it is a great typing accelerator. It accumulates words you use in the article and guesses that you are typing the same thing again. If you have an article full of long words, it is an amazing help. It is a pain if you are dashing off a 3 line note, however...

This is a ten page pager for an ACM journal, and as such i uses far too many long words. I still find auto complete irritates the hell out of me

Oh well. Horses for courses I suppose.

James

I thought that an ACM article would be written in Latex.

If you simply ignore the suggestions and carry on typing then it all comes out right.

This is one of the difficulties of adapting to new software. Personally I find myself waiting for other Word processors to pop up the long word I am retyping!

Does anybody remember Mindreader back in the DOS days? It was prompted on this feature.

Re previous post:

OOPS! I meant PROMOTED.

I go about things in an odd way .. I find it awkward to type in emacs or gedit, as its more difficult to read back to myself, so i type things out in OpenOffice, and then cut and paste the text into emacs for the final document..

I know its an awkward way of doing things, but I find I'm more productive that way..

What other editors do people use for this sort of thing? Anything that enlarges \sections and \subsections etc? And something that displays stuff in Times rather than monoscript?

James

For when you do need to use latex, there is a Latex IDE environment called 'kile' that is pretty good.
If you have a second monitor, you can have 'kdvi' load in the *.dvi output. When you update the dvi file, the kdvi display will reflect the changes immediately.

I've wondered the same thing every time I've installed an upgraded version of OpenOffice.org.

I wish all the fancy options came turned off by default. They have the "help agent" which is
a silly light-bulb popup turned on (anybody remember Microsoft's animated "paper clip?") and they
have five or six auto-type features turned on that I have to go disable after they've interrupted my
writing for the first time....

I'm grateful for such a generally good word processor (and I really like the spreadsheet, too), but
there's a lot of room for improvement. And yes, I would help if I had the skill. But I'm "just" a
user....

Cheers.. Looks good.. I may have a play with it later..

(gotta love apt: "apt-get install kile")

James