Using AutoCorrect

OpenOffice.org 2.x Writer Guide

Chapter 3: Working with Text

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• Selecting text
• Cutting, copying, and pasting text
• Moving paragraphs quickly
• Finding and replacing text and formatting
• Inserting special characters
• Formatting paragraphs
• Formatting characters
• Autoformatting
• Creating numbered or bulleted lists
• Using footnotes and endnotes
• Checking spelling
• Using the thesaurus
• Hyphenating words
• Using AutoCorrect
• Using word completion
• Using AutoText
• Line numbering
• Undoing and redoing changes
• Tracking changes to a document
• Linking to another part of a document
• Working with hyperlinks
• Tips and tricks

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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.