This is a wish to have an "unlink fields" implemented in LibreOffice. Microsoft Word has this feature implemented (Ctrl+Shift+F9). In my case, this feature would be useful to replace fields that cross-reference figures or tables in a document and replacing them by their text. More background information at https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=41572 Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1
Reporter wants to select some text and convert all fields to normal text. For details please see the very poor attachment in related AOOo bug. Unfortunately that document does not show a useful example, but one wher yo do not need the requested function at all. I see some advantage of such a function for mail merge fields. I insert Address data to my letters from Address Data base into mail merge fields Then I 'copy -> Paste special -> plain text', wot works well for me, but that will destroy formatting (one word bold, another red characters, a third one underlined ... I will check for Duplicates here.
No DUP found, so NEW!
This also greatly affects the usefulness of reference management tools, such as the popular Zotero. These tools have LibreOffice extensions that enable quick insertion and auto-generation of footnote text with the use of field codes. Before sending a scientific article to a publisher or a journal the writer will normally need to remove said field codes. Reference styles often mandate the use of italics or other types of styling to references, and it is therefore very impractical that these field codes cannot be removed without also removing the formatting. Manually adding back italics etc. can be extremely cumbersome in a longer academic article or a book manuscript, with hundreds of footnotes. See also this thread on the Zotero forums: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/25077/
*** Bug 80786 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 57566 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Note that in Word, Ctrl+Shift+F9 also converts hyperlinks to text. The scope of the proposed function needs to be clarified.
Oliver Specht committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/e846c8e5ed07e6b67a4375dd8ab4d4ca30fd9066 tdf#45946 Add function to convert field to text It will be available in 25.8.0. The patch should be included in the daily builds available at https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.
Seems to work now, verified in: Version: 25.8.0.0.alpha0+ (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community Build ID: 4957d832c76598e78a57324dad5b4de7345a33e2 CPU threads: 14; OS: Windows 10 X86_64 (build 19045); UI render: Skia/Raster; VCL: win Locale: hu-HU (hu_HU); UI: en-US Calc: threaded
(In reply to Mike Kaganski from comment #6) > Note that in Word, Ctrl+Shift+F9 also converts hyperlinks to text. The scope > of the proposed function needs to be clarified. The new "convert field to text" menu item does not appear for hyperlinks in Writer. The shortcut key Ctrl+Shift+F9 was assigned to the "Update Input Fields" command, this is kept and the new command does not have a shortcut assigned. This is bug 165829 now.