Using AutoCorrect

Getting Started with OpenOffice.org 2.x

Chapter 6: Getting Started with Writer

< Previous Section

Next Section >

• The Writer workspace
• Creating a new document
• Saving a document
• Working with text

• Cutting, copying, and pasting text
• Moving paragraphs quickly
• Finding and replacing text
• Inserting special characters
• Inserting dashes and non-breaking spaces
• Setting tab stops and indents
• Checking spelling
• Using AutoCorrect
• Using word completion
• Using AutoText
• Inserting notes

• Formatting text

• Using styles
• Formatting paragraphs
• Formatting characters
• Autoformatting
• Creating numbered or bulletted lists
• Hyphenating words

• Undoing and redoing changes
• Tracking changes to a document

• Recording changes
• Accepting or rejecting changes and comments

• Formatting pages

• Choosing a layout method
• Creating headers and footers
• Changing page margins

• Numbering pages

• Including the total number of pages
• Restarting page numbering
• Changing the format of page numbers

• Creating a table of contents
• Creating indexes and bibliographies
• Printing from Writer

< Previous Page

Next Page >

Writer's AutoCorrect function has a long list of common misspellings and typing errors, which it corrects automatically. For example, "hte" will be changed to "the". Select Tools > AutoCorrect to open the AutoCorrect dialog. There you can define which strings of text are corrected and how. In most cases, the defaults are fine.

AutoCorrect is turned on by default. To turn it off, uncheck Format > AutoFormat > While Typing.

• To stop Writer from replacing a specific spelling, use Tools > AutoCorrect > Replace, highlight the word pair and click Delete.
• To add a new spelling to correct, type it into the Replace and With boxes and click New.
• See the different pages of the dialog box for the wide variety of other options available to fine-tune AutoCorrect.

AutoCorrect can be used as a quick way to insert special characters. For example, (c) will be autocorrected to ©. You can add your own special characters.

AutoCorrect versus table number formats

Dates and numbers in tables may appear to AutoCorrect even when you disable the AutoCorrect function. This is because they have a separate setting. According to raindog469 of ubuntuforms.org:

[T]the way to prevent it from forcing "November 2009" to "11/01/09" (even though AutoCorrect and AutoFormat are disabled) is to select the whole table cell in which you're entering the text, open Table/Number Format, and set the format to Text ("@"). For some reason, just putting the cursor in the cell is not enough.