Why Can't Open Office Delete a Hyperlink?

Posted Monday, June 13, 2005, at 10:15AM by e;

My girlfriend has been using Open Office for the past while, and every now and then these problems arise that really get me fed up with OO as a piece of usable software. For instance, the issue today is that she had copied and pasted a quote from the Internet into her paper, and OO had automatically made that text a link without giving her the choice. Since she didn't realize what was going on, that link style got carried through to the rest of the paper, and before she knew what was up she had a paper that was basically a big hyperlink.

Automatically making something a link is a UI decision that I absolutely hate, but whatever, that should be a silly little problem to fix, right?

No. It would seem to me that OO's word processor has no function to remove a hyperlink. I tried just deleting the URL (which it made me do on a per-paragraph basis, or it wouldn't apply), but no luck. Now the link just pointed to the document itself. I even downloaded the help package so I could look in the documentation, and while I see plenty of documentation for making a hyperlink, I can find none for deleting one.

I finally turned to AbiWord, which puts a "Delete Hyperlink" option into the context menu for the right mouse button (when appropriate). I think the paper is now ok, but my disgust for OO isn't.