OO and Libre Office have a langstanding bug https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=7747 The select all function does not work in a document which starts with a table there is a workaround but this workaround does not work for odt files generated by the org converter. Now I generated by the org converter a document which I attach, Please look at the following document, which has been generated by a converter provided by org[. It contains tables which whose text cannot be selected via select all. If there is something wrong with the odt, please tell me and I will report it on the org mailing list. thanks Uwe Brauer now johnny smith told me: ,---- | | notwithstanding dave's comment, the odt seems either defective or | incompatible with aoo (which may be aoo's fault as well). more | specifically, the tables are quite lonely within their sections. they | have no text before them, nor after. such a document can't be created | by usual means of aoo, and thus it isn't handled as expected. e.g., | you can't type anything after the second table or after the first one | within its section, because there're no empty paragraphs after the | tables to take your input. you can't even peform select-all operation | manually (with a mouse rather than through ctrl+a). it seems that the | select operation uses contents of the elements to set | boundaries of the selection. so, if there's no such element, then | select-all doesn't work properly. | | to fix this, i inserted the following two paragraphs into content.xml of your file: | | some text after the first table | some text after the second table | | they follow the closing tags () of tables. there | appeared to be no way to do it through gui. | | after that select-all worked almost smoothly: it selected the cell on | the first press, the table on the second one and everything on the | third one. what was wrong is that it always started with the cell, | even when the caret was outside table. | | however, inserting a paragraph before each table fixed this. it didn't | require editing content.xml. the final version of the file is | attached, and i hope it won't be attenuated by antispam. | | i can't say on which program's account this bug is. consulting odf | specification may help answer this question `---- I attach both files: Uwe Brauer