Deleting Columns In Open Office

[Arcane_Secrets]

I've got kind of a 'ghost' column in an Open Office table that I keep trying to delete but the program won't let me. The issue is that its a column with a single cell to the right of split columns with ten cells (in a standard D&D PrC format) but trying to delete the additional column I'm trying to get rid of deletes the entire table, and merging it with anything next to it just puts the context of everything in the column to the left into a single unformatted cell. What should I be doing differently?

[veti]

You don't specify, but I'm guessing it's in a word processor (Writer) document, not a spreadsheet?

I would suggest simply deleting the whole table and recreating it from scratch. It sounds like the "delete column" function is getting confused, possibly by the split in the earlier column, and that could have happened in lots of different ways that, unless you created the table yourself, there's no realistic way to troubleshoot.

Sometimes, starting over is the simplest answer.

[jayem]

You don't specify, but I'm guessing it's in a word processor (Writer) document, not a spreadsheet?

I would suggest simply deleting the whole table and recreating it from scratch. It sounds like the "delete column" function is getting confused, possibly by the split in the earlier column, and that could have happened in lots of different ways that, unless you created the table yourself, there's no realistic way to troubleshoot.

Sometimes, starting over is the simplest answer.

Sounds like a good plan, I do the same with MS-office fairly regularly to get things aligned, playing nicely over a page boundary, or rearrange the order of rows.
[ETA, also from MS Office, the split table button is really good for letting you break the table into smaller parts, so you can fix/adjust the one section, unfortunately I think it does it by rows. Libre Office also has a Split Table menu option, but anything I do from home I can keep nice and simple]

The only additional suggestion Add a page break or two, Re-create the table in that free space, then delete the old table and page breaks, that way you can copy and paste where you can (also back up).

[137beth]

Maybe a bit of a derail, but...
what is it that you are trying to do in OpenOffice that you can't do at least as well in LibreOffice? The company that originally developed OpenOffice stopped maintaining it in 2011. The main developers of OpenOffice.org left the project to start LibreOffice in 2011. There's been a lot of active development of LO since then, while the Apache Foundation has been keeping their own fork of OpenOffice on life support for the last decade. Is there some specific old feature of OpenOffice that you need that isn't in current versions of LO?

I'm asking, because it's not uncommon that I hear people (mainly Windows users) who try Apache OpenOffice because the only free office suite they've heard of is one with the name "OpenOffice," and they don't realize the development of the original OpenOffice has shifted to a suite with a different name.

[Arcane_Secrets]

You don't specify, but I'm guessing it's in a word processor (Writer) document, not a spreadsheet?

I would suggest simply deleting the whole table and recreating it from scratch. It sounds like the "delete column" function is getting confused, possibly by the split in the earlier column, and that could have happened in lots of different ways that, unless you created the table yourself, there's no realistic way to troubleshoot.

Sometimes, starting over is the simplest answer.

That's what I ended up doing.

[Arcane_Secrets]

Maybe a bit of a derail, but...
what is it that you are trying to do in OpenOffice that you can't do at least as well in LibreOffice? The company that originally developed OpenOffice stopped maintaining it in 2011. The main developers of OpenOffice.org left the project to start LibreOffice in 2011. There's been a lot of active development of LO since then, while the Apache Foundation has been keeping their own fork of OpenOffice on life support for the last decade. Is there some specific old feature of OpenOffice that you need that isn't in current versions of LO?

I'm asking, because it's not uncommon that I hear people (mainly Windows users) who try Apache OpenOffice because the only free office suite they've heard of is one with the name "OpenOffice," and they don't realize the development of the original OpenOffice has shifted to a suite with a different name.

I was unaware of that, and thank you for pointing that out. I'll DL LibreOffice and see if everything carries over from it (which it should). If you're right, I'll probably transition over to it fully and give up on OpenOffice.

Besides upgrading software is probably the closest I'll get to anything ever getting better anyways at this rate.