Bug 43151

Summary: Cannot shut off autonumbering
Product: LibreOffice Reporter: David Benfell <benfell>
Component: WriterAssignee: Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED NOTABUG    
Severity: major CC: lohmaier
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
Crash report or crash signature: Regression By:

Description David Benfell 2011-11-21 14:52:54 UTC 
This is a longstanding and seriously irritating problem.

Trying to do an outline in LibreOffice is like pulling teeth. The autonumbering intervenes, screws up the numbering and screws up the formatting. It's just totally, completely WRONG and irreparable.

Unfortunately, those of us who are students occasionally have to do these things. (They're actually at best a mediocre idea.)  And this severely diminishes the usability of LibreOffice for students. You're basically forcing us to install Windows and Microsoft Office. It's that bad.

There are two pieces of advice for dealing with this I see on the web: 1) Turn off autonumbering by turning off autocorrect while typing. This advice even provides correct advice on how to find the option in the menus. But it is ineffective against autonumbering. 2) Write a macro. Who on God's green earth dreamed up the idea that all of us are programmers? Please stuff that idea where the sun doesn't shine.
Comment 1 Christian Lohmaier 2011-12-28 08:25:29 UTC 
This is an invalid bug, it mixes stuff and is more a "how would I do it right" kind of post that is better suited for a mailinglist, the rant-part is fine on your blog or personal website, but also only adds noise and will make your bug less likely be touched. People don't like to read wall-of-text to extract the necessary info.

But to your problem:
*Don't use any kind of autonumbering to create a document outline. Use Tools|Outline numbering instead (and the corresponding heading paragraph styles to structure your document

* To turn off autnumbering uncheck Format|AutoCorrect → while typing. It is effective for enumareations in current versions at least (both 3.4.4 as well as in 3.5.0beta2). (or go to Tools|AutoCorrect/AutoFormat and only uncheck the corresponding entry and leave the others you can live with enabled.