On-Screen keyboard icon no longer pops up when touch text box

Anonymous
2012-10-29T10:06:23+00:00

original title: On-Screen keyboard help.

Hello,

I am a Windows 7 Power user. I recently upgraded my Acer Iconia Tab w500 from Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 8 Pro. The product works great however previously in Windows 7 whenever in desktop or anywhere that requires a text input, when I click on the text box, a keyboard icon will popup and this will allow me to click it to launch the on screen keyboard, However after the upgrade to Windows 8 Pro, this icon does not appear anymore and I cannot find the settings anywhere to request it to launch OSK on text box. I can however, manually launch it from the taskbar. Please advise.

* OSK auto launches when in metro mode. (e.g.) swipe in from left and click Search. When the text box appears and I click it, OSK launches automatically.

I am unsure if this is a bug in Windows 8 Pro. However I have verified by doing a clean install on Windows 8 too and it has the same issue.

My tablet has 4 points of input.

EDIT: The specific or equivalent program I am talking about is:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Using-the-writing-pad-and-touch-keyboard-in-Tablet-PC-Input-Panel

Tablet PC Input Panel

Thanks, Nic

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Email and communications

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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  1. Anonymous
    2013-12-09T20:07:04+00:00

    Having the same issue - at first I thought I had messed up something in the settings, but apparently this is normal behaviour. Just paid over €1000 for a Surface Pro 2 with Win 8.1 - I expected a lot of the bugs from Windows 8 would have been worked out by now. However, I believe this feature has been intentionally omitted to make the desktop experience worse than the preferred Metro experience, as has already been suggested. Personally, I am not even getting a pop-up keyboard when I open the Search charm when in Desktop or Metro mode (with Touch keyboard folded back). Is this happening to everyone? This is extremely frustrating as the keyboard icon is obscured by the search bar on the right side of the screen so it is impossible to even manually call it up from the taskbar.

    While I am all in favour of progressing the Touch UI, it simply isn't ready for mainstream work at present. The applications in the Windows store are severely lacking, and even the mainstream apps are extremely buggy. I have a brand new machine and have used a number of apps (Twitter, IE, Facebook, LastPass, OneNote, EverNote etc.) but they all feel clunky and are missing a lot of features of the desktop counterparts, so I find myself continuously switching back to the desktop.

    Don't get me wrong - I love the Surface and I think it has a great future as a proper work tablet, but this crippling desktop experience is extremely frustrating. I would hope that Microsoft will respond to this feedback positively as these seem like relatively small issues that impact on an otherwise highly competent device.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-12-17T13:27:37+00:00

    mr.  siddegowa, you did not address the issue.  the osk will not auto activate in desktop mode forcing the user to waste swipes to get to the text input device.  what are you folks thinking?

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-12-18T22:32:33+00:00

    Editing Flicks?

    They are still present in Windows 8/8.1.

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  4. Anonymous
    2013-12-18T22:35:06+00:00

    I do not have this problem with my Surface Pro 2.

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  5. Anonymous
    2013-12-19T07:28:19+00:00

    Either you don't understand the issue being described or you are the only one that somehow doesn't have it.

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