Problems with OpenOffice.org 2.0 Spellcheck
This has been driving me nuts for ages and I finally decided to do something about it.
I am running OpenOffice.org 2.0 on an Ubuntu 6.06 workstation. Spellcheck has never worked. Ever. If you click the Spellcheck button you just get a message saying “the spellcheck is complete” even though there are glaring spelling errors in the document.
Here’s how I fixed the problem. All I’m doing is changing the default language in effect, not installing a new dictionary. Hopefully this is useful to someone:
- Open a new document;
- Press F11 to see the Styles & Formatting menu;
- Right-click on Default and then click Modify;
- Select the Font tab and click in the Language combo box. The languages with dictionaries installed have a small ABC-tick icon to the left. In my case it was set to English (Australia), which had no dictionary, so I changed it to English (UK);
- Click OK and close the Styles & Formatting window;
- Select File / Templates / Save and give your new template a name, like “dr-ron-template”
- Close the document;
- Select File / Templates / Organize;
- Double-click My Templates, find the one you have just created, right-click and select “Set as default template”;
- Click close.
That’s it! Now whenever you create a new document, you should notice the (un)familiar red wiggly line below your spelling mistakes. Note that any document you created prior to this, in the old “default” template, will still be using the old language and will not have spell checking enabled.