Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Hi,
I just have upgraded OpenOffice to 4.1.0, and as I have a company form to fill for expense reimbursement, I found that a change has been made to the input fields feature : they can be edited in-place whereas previously when one clicked on an input field, a box open and we have to type the text in the box.
At first I found it great, but as soon as I had to enter my data I was very disappointed by these facts :
1) I cannot paste data in the input field : pressing ctrl-v does nothing, and the Edit->Paste menu is greyed.
2) I cannot select text in the input field except the whole content of the field, so if I want to delete a word or part of the content I have to delete one letter at a time or delete all the content and type the new content from scratch.
3) When the content of an input field has been deleted, it is impossible to get the focus back to the input field : when I try to click it either put the cursor before or after the now zero-length field, and as my document is a protected form it pops up a notice window when I try to enter text as the cursor is not in the input field.
Does anyone encounter the same issues ? How to proceed to post it as a bug fix request ?
Thanks
Fabrice

Welcome to the community forum!

Sorry you're having trouble. This is a new feature and (apparently) wasn't completely tested/finished. I expect the only solution is to go back to use AOO 4.0.1 until the problems get sorted out.

As far as I see,

#1: Same here. Edit > Paste is not disabled for me but it does nothing if I choose it. Copy/Cut from the field text works ok.

#2: Depends on how you select the text. Selecting text with the mouse is difficultbut does work and only works for the first few characters, using the arrow keys w/wo Shift works correctly.

#3: I think I see what you mean but I can get the cursor back into the input field if I move the cursor by the arrow keys. I was not able to edit the empty field by clicking on it: the cursor always ended up before or after the field.

Edit: PS:

Changed: mouse selection is nearly useless.

There is a wiki page regarding input fields and the new in-place editing: https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Writer/Input_Fields

Edit: PPS:

#3: You can get the old pop-up field dialog, even with an empty field, by clicking anywhere near the field and pressing Ctrl+Shift+F9. Not obvious or elegant but it is at least a workaround.

Hi Acknak
thank you for your quick answer and for the work-around, I won't have to rollback to 4.0.1 even it there is this issue with the in-place editing.
I am rather pleased that this change has been implemented, as it is somewhat tedious to fill forms with the pop-up field dialogs.

In my case, for the empty input fields, the arrow keys don't help because the input fields are in a table, one input field per cell with no text around, so when I press the arrow key, the cursor is moved to the next or previous cell instead of selecting the input field.
Pressing Ctrl+Shift+F9 will open the pop-up field dialog but starting from the first input field of the document : when I put the cursor around one input field inside the document, it opens the dialog on the first field and I have to click "Next" until it reaches the desired input field.
Thanks
Fabrice

Thank you acknak for the Info and the follow up

#3: You can get the old pop-up field dialog, even with an empty field, by clicking anywhere near the field and pressing Ctrl+Shift+F9. Not obvious or elegant but it is at least a workaround.

This helps some but for me this is a total breaker -- way too cumbersome and I am forced to roll back if I can

I am having the same problems on input fields.