68
Problems Solved
What causes random hyphens in LibreOffice Writer?
,
QI have a weird problem. I don’t
know why but LibreOffice
Writer now cuts off some words
at the end of the line and adds a hyphen,
so these words are split over two lines. I
feel sure this didn’t used to be the case,
but I only noticed this phenomenon
recently. Perhaps it’s always been this
way and I’m kidding myself? It looks
really stupid and ugly to me. I’ve tried the
alignment buttons on the toolbar but
they don’t help. Am I imagining that this
is new? Could it have happened because
of an update? I do update LibreOffice
reasonably regularly.
James SkidmoreA
It’s not new, but nor are you
imagining it. In fact, this is a
feature of Writer that evidently
has become enabled on your setup,
perhaps by accident or just as likely a
minor glitch during an update.
Either way, it’s easy to fix. The solution
is to first open the Format menu and then
choose the Paragraph option. Next, in the
Paragraph window, click to select the TextFlow tab. There, under the Hyphenation
heading, click to remove the tick from the
box labelled Automatically (see
screenshot above), and then click OK.
That will fix the problem for the
selected paragraph (or the whole
document, if everything is selected – orit’s a new document). But it’s also
possible your preferred style sheet has
been modified in an unwanted way. To fix
this, open the View menu and choose
Styles. Now right-click the relevant style
and choose Modify, and then just proceed
as above.Q
I’m attempting to get my
PC to update to Windows 11,
but when I try I get a
message that my computer must
support Secure Boot. However, I’ve
looked in the BIOS and, as far as I can
see, it does – it says enabled! I’ve
tried disabling it then enabling it,
and I’ve reset numerous other settings
to default.
However, Microsoft’s PC Health
Check app (www.snipca.com/41756)
still says it isn’t supported. I’ve seen
plenty of advice on TPM but very little
on Secure Boot. I don’t know where to
turn to next.
Ian TrotterA
This is probably because
your computer’s boot drive
was set up using the
traditional master-boot record (MBR)
system (see screenshot above right),
but starting up with Secure Boot needs
a drive prepared with a globally uniqueWhy can’t my computer run Windows 11?
partition table (GPT).
For reasons we’re about to explain, this
ideally should be done before installing
any operating system.
The good news is that you canconvert an existing MBR drive to GPT.
The bad news is that doing so carries
some risk, because if you make a
mistake or something goes wrong,
you can kiss goodbye to any data
on the drive. If you’re okay with that
then it’s straightforward, though do
back up!
First click Start followed by Settings,
then ‘Update & Security’, and then
Recovery followed by Restart. Next,
click Troubleshoot followed by
‘Advanced options’, and then click
Command Prompt. Note that you
might at this point need to log into
Windows 10.
The required command is mbr2gpt
/convert /allowFullOS, which you’ll
also find on our Pastebin page at
http://www.snipca.com/41757.
So, type that into the Command
Prompt window, or copy and paste
it from Pastebin, and then press
Enter. Now just wait while the task
completes.Click the Hyphenation box to clear the tick – this will stop lines being hyphenated in LibreOfficeYou can convert an existing MBR drive to GPT,
but there are risks so make sure to back up25 May – 7 June 2022 • Issue 632