How do I stop the system from trying to complete my words or sentences for me?

[water]

I am using LibreOffice to write papers. Far too frequently when I hit the space bar it keeps writing, letters I have not told it to write.

actually I had somehow fixed settings in order to stop this twice before when some very nice person unknown to me, helped me with step by step instructions. but the system refuses to abide by my settings for longer than about a month. and it has never NOT ONCE completed a word or phrase or sentence correctly… so often I have to go back and reread everything I have written to find and undo all the changes the system makes. and I cannot find the instructions from before.

and I can NEVER find any user manual type instructions for libre office anywhere…

[ve3oat]

Anywhere? Have you even looked at the LibreOffice website for documentation?

Hope this helps.

[water]

@ve3oat
I’ve been at the LibreOffice website at least 2 dozen times and could never figure out how to navigate it to find anything helpful. your link provided Me with the “Quick Reference Card” which I have now downloaded and renamed something understandable such as “LibreOffice Help, quick reference guide” so now I can try to figure out how to use it. when I tried the “help online” I got so quickly lost that I simply quickly backed out of it. as far as the books are concerned, I don’t know if I have 6.0, 6.2, 6.3,6.4 or what and I followed Instructions given to learn the answer to that question and could not find it… all I got was that “Libre Office help is not installed on your computer” with no instructions to change that status… that is STILL all I get. and I don’t know what a lot of the book titles even mean… Thank You so much for that link…

[water]

@ve3oat
oh no. turns out the link is no help at all. I click on the quick reference card and all it allows me to do is to download it. then I go to the downloaded reference and other than an explanation of the control-_ ways to do things I already know how to do (differently) there is no help there… nothing is linkable, lots makes little or no sense to me. and for example, nowhere does it talk about how to number the pages in the 75 or more papers I produce annually that I distribute to hundreds, sometimes thousands of people. the last one was 19 pages - without numbers. oh well.

[ve3oat]

You can buy a printed copy of many of the guide books, for example, this one for Writer v6.0 :

https://documentation.libreoffice.org/en/english-documentation/writer/

Later versions (6.2, 6.4) of the same basic product (6.0) with have added features and improvements but they are all basically the same. Reading the book at your leisure can be a good way to understand how the software works and to avoid frustration in using many of the features. (At my age, I prefer paper copies over trying to read instructions and explanations on-line.)

[PaulJanzen]

Hi,

This is easy to change and setup as you like.

Go to your Document or a new one. (I assume you do your writing in LibreOffice WRITER).

Then open your menu on Tools > AutoCorrect > AutoCorrect options…

On the ne Window that opens, go to the last tab: Word Completion:

Here you can either (1) enable or disable it, or customize it to your specific needs. Like apending a space after the completion, or change the numer ob letters a Word has to have in order to enable Word completion, or change the key modifier that makes the completion (2) you can choose following keys: End, Return, Space, Right (arrow) and Tab.

I hope this helps…

As for the last comment, there is always an online Manual to help you with almost every task in LibreOffice, you can find it here: Instructions for Using LibreOffice Writer

and to the specific topic about Word completion can be found here:
https://help.libreoffice.org/6.4/en-US/text/swriter/guide/word_completion.html

[water]

@PaulJanzen
ahhhhhhh, wonderful! thank you SO MUCH. I have done the disable word complettion and gone in and (I hope) told the system to just leave me alone when I am typing… having done this before and watched it work for awhile and then revert to its bad habits, I just hope it will stick for longer than a few weeks this time. I wish I knew how to mark your answers so this conversation would be easy to find in the future if it ever happens again but I could not find any arrow such as I was told was the way to mark it as the best answer.
about the online Manual… I’ve been looking for that for about 8 or 10 years now and repeatedly asked folks… now you just provided the link! very helpful. but when I asked “how to do page numbers” I found 9 pages of answers and did not understand any of the 10 responses on the first page! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!

[water]

Hey!!! I finally found the arrow to mark YOUR answer as CORRECT! maybe I’ll be able to find this again in 2 or 3 months when the system starts trying to write for me again! thanks, again, Paul Janzen.

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@PaulJanzen
I tried to upvote your response which was so helpful. I don’t think I was able to do so. sorry.