Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Now, before anyone says this is the most frequently asked question on the board, I know it is. I also know that it is a problem tbat has been going on since 2008 - i.e. 10th anniversary this year. Which raises the question, "Why is it still occurring?", and I have reservations that the answer is, "Because it's the fault of the user". And if that is the answer, then Open Office needs to be made more resilient.

Open Office was working fine until I downloaded the latest update; now it isn't.

SOLVED.

Close OpenOffice and the Quickstarter. Open File Explorer. Copy and paste %appdata%\OpenOffice\4 in the File Explorer Address Bar and press Enter. Rename the "user" folder (user.old is good to use). Start OpenOffice.

Thank you for the speedy and effective reply. I had searched through a number of threads on the problem and found nothing as simple as this. Does this only apply if the problem arises following the download of a new version of Open Office, or does it apply in other circumstances, e.g. the user profile goes corrupt?

This applies if one needs or decides that a new user profile is required. The various components of the old profile may be brought forward to the new, which is the reason for leaving the user.old files. The file that should not be brought forward is registrymodifications.xcu as this probably contains or lacks (depending on circumstances) the information causing the user profile to misbehave. John_Ha has a macro to merely delete that instead - I'm sure he'll supply ap ointer to it when he comes online.

I have never had a problem with new installations failing to pick up dictionaries and spelllcheck continuing working; the only time I have ever needed to delete the user profile was after a power failure which corrupted my user profile - but note: I use linux.

Just to confirm, problem solved. Note made for future use.

RoryOF wrote:John_Ha has a macro to merely delete that instead - I'm sure he'll supply a pointer to it when he comes online.

See Spell checker "red wriggly lines" - beta test fix for AOO in the first post in this forum [Solved] Spell Check Not Working (words red underlined)

Irritated44 wrote:Now, before anyone says this is the most frequently asked question on the board, I know it is. I also know that it is a problem tbat has been going on since 2008 - i.e. 10th anniversary this year. Which raises the question, "Why is it still occurring?", and I have reservations that the answer is, "Because it's the fault of the user". And if that is the answer, then Open Office needs to be made more resilient.

OpenOffice is maintained by volunteers - there are no paid staff. Microsoft employs 124,000 people. I am sure that if you were to offer to finance someone for a couple of weeks to investigate the problem your assistance would be greatly appreciated.

The question may be the most common on the forum but do a little maths. About 200,000,000 people have downloaded AOO and we were getting about two questions a week, so this represents a failure rate of 1 in 100,000,000 million users per week. When you consider that almost completely untrained people use AOO, that almost none seem to read the manual (have you read it?), that they run Windows/MacOS/Linux but have never been on a training course, that they don't understand PCs, that sounds reasonable to me. It is an intermittent fault because if it was reproduce-able it would have been diagnosed. How would you diagnose something which only goes wrong once in every 100,000,000 uses?

I have been using AOO and OOo before AOO for 20 years or more and I have almost 5,000 .odt files on my PC, where hundreds are over 1MB in size. I have never had a corrupted AOO profile and I have never had spelling fail ...

... but I am a trained IT professional and I always shut down my PC properly.

If your problem is solved please view your first post in this thread and click the Edit button (top right in the post) and add [Solved] in front of the subject.

RoryOF wrote:Close OpenOffice and the Quickstarter. Open File Explorer. Copy and paste %appdata%\OpenOffice\4 in the File Explorer Address Bar and press Enter. Rename the "user" folder (user.old is good to use). Start OpenOffice.

A word of advice. After following the above steps, when you next come to use Open Office any templates you have created are no longer available. To solve this problem, shut down Open Office and the Quickstarter, open File Explorer and copy and paste %appdata%\OpenOffice\4 in the File Explorer Address Bar and press Enter. Open the folder and then open the old user folder. It will be user.old if you have followed the steps above exactly. Open the templates folder and copy your templates. Then open the new user folder and the template folder in it and paste the templates from the template folder in user.old in to it. Close the main folder and restart Open Office and your templates are now available.

The reason we recommend renaming the user profile is so that dictionaries and extensions may be brought forward if the matter arises. We see this as a secondary stage - users are frequently so distressed by the misbehaviour of OO necessitating the creation of a new user profile that the extra information to restore the customisation complicates the process. In any event, a considerable number of users would not have any such customisation.

RoryOF wrote:The reason we recommend renaming the user profile is so that dictionaries and extensions may be brought forward if the matter arises. We see this as a secondary stage - users are frequently so distressed by the misbehaviour of OO necessitating the creation of a new user profile that the extra information to restore the customisation complicates the process. In any event, a considerable number of users would not have any such customisation.

I would imagine that they would be still more distressed when, having thought they had sorted OpenOffice out, they then find no templates available when they want to use them.

As for a considerable number of users not having any such customisations, well that's fine for them; I'm also thinking of the users this bit of advice might help, even if it's only a few.

Thank you. I've been dealing with this since the last update to AOO and was really considering switching back to another program. This solved my issue, as well. I appreciate it.