Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 62777
delete key behavior inconsistent with Excel
Last modified: 2006-03-27 14:36:30 UTC
The behavior of the "delete" key and "backspace" key is inconsisent with that in Excel, and in my opinion doesn't make sense from a usability perspective. The current behavior is to pop up the "delete contents" dialog when pressing the "delete" key, but to simply delete the contents of a selection when you press backspace. Compare this to the behavior in Excel: --When I press delete in Excel, it simply deletes the contents of my selection. --When I press backspace in Excel, it deletes the selection, and then goes into edit mode for the top-left cell of my selection. As a user who is looking at switching to OpenOffice at home, but who still uses Excel in the office, this behavior seriously impacts the usability of OpenOffice for me. I make a lot of mistakes when I'm making spreadsheets, and I hit the delete key quite often. Adding an extra step every time I want to delete doubles the work I have to do to accomplish that task. If I train myself to hit backspace instead, I am face the same issue when I use Excel at work, and am forced to hit backspace, then enter or some other key to get out of edit mode. On the other hand, the complex delete function is very rarely used, and is already accessible from the context menu as well as from the edit menu. Why not tie the frequently used actions to single key combinations that match those of Excel (making it easy for new users to adapt to openoffice), and leave the complex delete in the menu akin to the "paste special" function? If you need a key combination for comlex delete, I would suggest shift-delete or shift-ctrl-delete.
JA: I would like to vote against this request. The behavior in Calc has the advantage to have two different functions to delete content of a selected cell range. Using the delete key you can define what type of content you would like to delete (eg. formatting). Since 1995 no user complained about this difference.
JA: Changing issue type to enhancement
JA: changin platform to All
Please do not dismiss this as a feature. Having two different functions is not an advantage, it is a usability problem. Nearly 100% of the users who are considering using openoffice already have experience with Excel, and this behavior is totally inconsistent with their previous experience. I am not the only person to complain about it since 1995. See "answer #312" in the openoffice.org knowledgebase: http://mindmeld.cybersite.com.au/?page=ask&submit_selected=1&thoughtId=312 At the very least, there should be an option in preferences to provide consistent look-and-feel.
Duplicate of Issue 9392. JA, just so you know there has been many complaints about this as a severe usability issue since November 19, 2002. Novell's version in Suse even has the keys swapped by default. There is already a patch to swap the keys available, but it is not the proper solution since Openoffice.org users that do not use Excel still want the default to be the backspace key. The people that are converting from Excel or using both simultaneously obviously do not want to spend 24 hours compiling OpenOffice.org just to get a proper key binding option. The proper solution is to have an option to swap the keys in the dialog window that pops up or to set the behavior in the options. The code for the options and dialog windows is a bit harder to understand than just swapping the 2 keys like Novell did. I would have changed it already if I had the skill to write a proper patch that could get put in the upstream code base. Please dont vote against an option (not a default) the rest of us have been asking about for the last 3.5 years. Weirdboy, marking this resolved as a duplicate, but please add to the votes on Issue 9392. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 9392 ***
and closed