Saturday, November 27, 2010

Open Office spellcheck fail

I'm using Open Office for my word processor and spreadsheet, and it it mysteriously decided to give up spellchecking. It turns out you can't just specify "I want to use US English" as a default when you load the program; and when you discover that it's not working, you can't get anything useful from what they laughingly refer to as a "Help" file. What you have to do is search the web for "Open Office spellcheck problem", go down the list until you find the [Troubleshooting] Spell check thread, and carry out the eight steps listed.

Why the developers thought you ought to go through this search and manual fix, instead of dealing with it during set up, I couldn't guess.

But I have successfully extracted the arcane knowledge, and now my spell check works (at least until I close this document). Except  some of what is marked as misspelled, isn't, and I'm having to add words to the dictionary. I understand them not having "Lynnhaven" and "werepiranha" in their default standard dictionary, but how could they have left out "shoggoth"?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's almost as good as my last user of Star Office (or maybe it was earlier Open Office) to do a halloween newsletter.

1) It's colour choices for text did not include orange. (one strike)
2) and 3) (worth two strikes) - I setup a backup by turning on autobackup and setting a path. It accepted it. Then at some point the power failed. We got power back, I restarted. No document. (Why: If you input a path in the autosave dialog that DNE, it does not warn you nor does it create it.)

Given how critical document backups should be to a word processor, I considered this a catastrophic failure and went back to MS products.

T.