Text recovery

[gigglby]

Word had a trick to undo typographical errors as you type them so long aws the material wasn't save, yet. I believe it was "shift+Z". Does OpenOffice have a tool like this? I'm using Macbook Pro now instead of Windows. Thanks

[robleyd]

Ctrl+ Z is what you are thinking of, and yes, AOO has it. The key combination may vary on Mac - if you are new to Mac you might find [Tutorial] Mac FAQ useful reading.

Screenshot is from Calc, but Writer is essentially the same. You can use a keyboard shortcut, Edit | Undo menu option or the undo icon shown by the red arrow. You can undo up to the number of steps defined in the AOO configuration - Tools | Options | OpenOffice | Memory (on Mac I think OpenOffice | Preferences instead of Tools | Options) - whilst the file is open, regardless of whether the file has been saved.

[Bill]

Undo

[gigglby]

robleyd....thanks a lot. I don't know why, but sometimes my openoffice gets extremely sensitive. I'll hit the delete button and suddenly a sentence or two is gone. At least I can recover it, now.

[robleyd]

Perhaps you are inadvertently making a selection, which then delete removes? Only speculation on my part, as only you can know what you are doing at the time...

[gigglby]

No, that's not it robleyd. It did it again today. I placed the cursor behind a word that I had already typed and instantly, 3 and half lines of text disappeared. In the past I would have to go into an archived copy and re-copy the text to paste in. But now, I just went to edit and Undo...and viola! It was back! It has done this to me a handful since I've had OpenOffice, and that's been a year now.

[RusselB]

Since this seems to be happening to you, and few others (if anyone else), I'm going to suggest that you reset your OpenOffice User Profile.
See [Tutorial] The OpenOffice User Profile for assistance.
This usually cures problems that seem to be inexplicable and/or irrelevant to anything else.

[gigglby]

Thanks...I'll give it a shot.

[RoryOF]

On the rare occasions I have seen that happen, a new OO User Profile cured it.

[gigglby]

So RoryOF, did you delete your copy of OO and then reinstall it under a new user name? Is that what you did?

[RusselB]

The link in my earlier post gives all of the required steps to reset your user profile.
Generally speaking a deletion of OpenOffice and then a reinstallation doesn't affect the user profile, with the main exception of there being no profile currently made.

[RoryOF]

So RoryOF, did you delete your copy of OO and then reinstall it under a new user name? Is that what you did?

No; because of a user's - often a professional writer's - need to maintain continuity of OO dictionaries, autocorrects and installed extensions across OO upgrades, OO does not generate a new User profile when doing minor upgrades ; it only generates a new profile between version number upgrades (i.e. from OO 3.x to OO 4.y)

So reinstalling OO won't generate a new User Profile (which is where the trouble may lie); you need to explicitly (as RussellB has indicated) rename your old OO User Profile. That done, if dictionaries etc are important, you can manually bring them forward to the new default profile OO will generate on next startup of OO.

[John_Ha]

Strange problems are sometimes fixed by resetting the profile - see Resetting the user profile.