Writer contains a selection of tools designed to help you create great documents and present a professional image to the world. And despite being fairly simple documents to design, when drafting a letter, which these days tends only to be used for very important things, you don’t want bad spelling and a flaky layout to let you down. By default, Writer has the Auto Spell Check tool turned on. This feature draws a wavy red line under any misspelled words. Right- clicking such a word opens a contextsensitive menu (see Figure 1-23) offering a selection of words you may have intended to use and also a few other options with which you can add the word to a dictionary if it is correct or set the language correctly if, for example, you’re attempting to use the word
“colour” and the document is set to US.
“colour” and the document is set to US.
If the red wavy lines are annoying, switch off the Auto Spell Check (which is in the fourth section of the main toolbar) and, after the document is finished, use the normal spell checker (Tools --> Spellcheck, or press F7). This launches a dialog box where each “incorrect” word is shown with options for selecting a different word or redefining the current selection as correct (see Figure 1-24). The Ignore Once button will move over a word by highlighting it again if it appears in the text. Ignore All will note the word as acceptable on a document- wide basis and will not highlight it again.
The right- click menu offers a selection of words “close” to the incorrectly spelled one.
The Spellcheck dialog box allows you to go through every incorrectly typed word
in the document.
in the document.
The Add button adds the highlighted word to the standard dictionary, and the Auto- Correct button adds the word, and the selected “correct” version to the AutoCorrect dictionary. This latter tool is really useful if you consistently spell a word wrong (we’ll cover this more in Chapter 3), and you want the software to change it as you type.
Tip If your version of OpenOffice.org is not displaying the wavy spelling lines, it could mean that no dictionaries have been installed. Dictionaries in many languages can be downloaded from the OpenOffice.org
web site as Manager) as shown in Figure 1-25. Once added, a dictionary is accessible by right- clicking and choosing Tools --> Spelling and Grammar.
