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Can you disable the find and replace feature in OpenOffice.org Writer?

We are a school, and the students are cheating by using this feature to avoid reading the entire document.

We're looking for a way to lock or disable this feature from being used. Is there a configuration or setting that can set this up?

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i am referring to the edit/find&replace feature. we are a school, and the students are cheating by using this feature to avoid reading the entire document. – dan eckstrom Jan 18 '11 at 13:26
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Even if you disable it on OpenOffice, they can copy the entire text to another text editing program (e.g. notepad, wordpad) and use CTRL+F as well. – Mehper C. Palavuzlar Jan 18 '11 at 13:38
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Learning search/scan skills is actually not a bad thing. Instead of doomed technological fixes, just quiz them on the content, which they'll only know if they've read the whole thing. – CarlF Jan 18 '11 at 13:55
@ Mehper: you can put down your comment as the answer @ dan eckstrom : please edit your question and put what you wrote in comments there , makes the question clearer – Shakehar Jan 18 '11 at 14:06
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@Shark: Please refer to How comment @replies work, your way of addressing doesn't result in @Mehper getting notified of your comment – Sathya♦ Jan 18 '11 at 16:12
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3 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

See :

OpenOffice Customizing the User Interface
Customizing OpenOffice.org

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Why under-vote, for bloody hell ? – harrymc Jan 19 '11 at 6:19
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I'm guessing its because of this: meta.superuser.com/questions/500/… (Or at least the principle behind the post on Meta) – Joe Taylor Jan 19 '11 at 13:36
If I start copying entire articles into my answers, I'll surely get down-voted for the opposite reason. – harrymc Jan 19 '11 at 16:23
"This answer is not useful" is and more like a comment than actually helping. Plus, this answer is akin to "figure it out for yourself somewhere else" – random♦ Jan 19 '11 at 20:40
@random: My answer is more like "the links contain a description of the process with screenshots, much better than anything I could do in a couple of sentences". – harrymc Jan 19 '11 at 20:47
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up vote 1 down vote

I formerly posted this as a comment but now reposting as an answer.

Even if you disable find & replace feature in OpenOffice, your students can copy the entire text to another text editing program (e.g. notepad, wordpad, etc.) and use CTRL+F as well. In short, you cannot prevent them from searching and replacing just by blocking this feature in OpenOffice.

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  1. Save the file to .HTML, open that in a browser and set that browser in full-screen mode.

  2. Remove the keyboard which restricts them to scrolling with the mouse.

    Let them write their answers on a piece of paper instead...

  3. Although that should be enough,
    you can also disable right clicking by pasting a piece of code before </body>.

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This answer is a reductio ad absurdum of the question. – frabjous Jan 19 '11 at 19:00
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