Bug#305659: openoffice.org: Extremely annoying question about "saving changes" when OO is in the background
Package: openoffice.org
Version: 1.1.3-8
Severity: important
Openoffice has aquired a nasty habit of periodically asking
if I want to save changes. That really disturbs the way I usually
work with openoffice. I use openoffice mostly as a document
reader, to read openoffice/staroffice/word documents while composing
a reply in my email reader.
Openoffice mistakenly believes I make "changes", either because it
is flat out _wrong_ (I didn't do a thing) or sometimes because
I typed a handful of letters into an OO window by mistake when OO
grabbed focus as I was writing in another window.
Either way, I read some text in OO and turns my attention to the
email program (thunderbird) to wrrite a few paragraphs of replies.
While I type in thunderbird, OO suddenly jumps to the foreground
and pops up an autosave question. This is _extremely_ annoying,
I wasn't even using OO at the moment. OO did not do this to me before,
so it is a regression too. The "important" status of this report is
deserved, this behaviour is really work-wrecking and disrupts
work with all other apps.
It looks like this popup is fired by a timer, long after changes
were made or misdetected. (Copying text from OO does _not_ change
the document, resizing tOO so it fits beside another app is _not_
change, moving the cursor around is _not_ change . . .)
OO competes with ms-office to some extent - please don't think that
the open sopurce world need all the same _nuisances_ ms users
have in addition to similiar functionality.
Suggestions for improvement:
============================
Best alternative
Remove that popup completely. Popups is _really_ bad user interface,
because they force the user to react then and there. OO has a
status line at the bottom, just tell that an autosave was done there.
Or don�t even tell, just do it. (Well, don't save into the
main file if the user don't ask for that - save to some
autosave file. Look at the editor Lyx, it gets autosaving right.
If the popup absolutely _have_ to remain:
I can't see why - but if OO designers insist on keeping it:
* make sure it _never ever_ pops up while OO doesn't have
keyboard focus. Because OO is then interfering badly with
another app. OO should only ever pop things up while
having focus.
* The popup should preferably _not_ grab focus and _not_ raise
the openoffice window. That would make the popup a lot less
annoying.
Helge Hafting
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (900, 'testing'), (800, 'experimental'), (800, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.12-rc2-mm1
Locale: LANG=no_NO.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=no_NO.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Versions of packages openoffice.org depends on:
ii dictionaries-common [openoffi 0.24.10 Common utilities for spelling dict
ii openoffice.org-bin 1.1.3-8 OpenOffice.org office suite binary
ii openoffice.org-debian-files 1.1.3-8+1 Debian specific parts of OpenOffic
ii openoffice.org-l10n-en [openo 1.1.3-8 English (US) language package for
ii openoffice.org-l10n-nb [openo 1.1.3-8 Norwegian Bokmal language package
ii ttf-opensymbol 1.1.3-8 The OpenSymbol TrueType font
ii xml-core 0.09 XML infrastructure and XML catalog
-- no debconf information
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