Open Office : Auto correct feature.

Open Office has a great auto replacement feature, however it needs to be fixed up before it can become more useful. I first noticed it when I typed in something like 1/2 then it changed into ½ as soon as I thumbed the space bar.

Problem 1.
But as always there is a problem. If you are from say New Zealand and you have installed the New Zealand dictionary then none of these features will work until you add them in, otherwise you would have to go and use either UK or US spelling.

Problem 2.
By the way if you selected say New Zealand spelling option as you installed open office but have not gone to the extra hassle of installing the New Zealand dictionary then the spell checker will not work.

Problem 3.
If you go into the Auto correct feature as seen in the picture to the right Replace (tab) there are some very strange spellers out there, for example one could be lead to believe the most common way to spell and wrong is adn how scary. But there are some very good options like when you type could of been it will auto change to could have been, not to mention anymore of the auto-change options from ? of ? to ? have ?

Of course I had to make something more useful like adding in the seven days of the week all lower case and make the replacement word first letter uppercase, then of course you have add in all the months of the year for the same.

The third column in the table is just a suggestion of what could be typed in to give the character listed in the first column, some of them are used already such as 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 Who knows what someone might use for the other characters if they what to fix part of Open Office to add more. Because I often write HTML pages in the word processor Open Office and use the format in column two, I copied what is in column two but replaced the ampersand with a comma, so to get the micro symbol type in ,micro after all how often do you use comma at the start of a word. The font suggestion in the last column is only a suggestion, as not all the fonts hold all the characters on the list, such as “Palatino Linotype”. But then soon we will run into problem number four.

Problem 4.
What if you spent hours and hours and hours fixing it up to make it more useful only to have all your work trashed when you upgrade to the next version of Open Office?
Problem 4. Unfortunately
It is true, half my work got trashed when I made a upgrade to 4.1.1 Why is it people can not spell can correctly but they have to use the only miss-spelt variant as acn

Problem 5 (Bottom feeders)
As I typed a story one day a red zig zag line appeared under the time e.g. 6am I had a quick look in the Auto Replace and could not find anything that would auto change it to 6 am. I thought maybe there is some kinky feature that just might tidy things up automatically. So I made the mistake of asking a web site forum group. I never did get a answer on my Auto correct, but some idiot gave me a run down how I should use the edit ⇒ find and replace. Why would you want to waste all your time going to edit ⇒ find and replace? Why not just get into the habit instead of using 6am put in 6 am.

Is it something they are putting into plastic that is contaminating our food and making the world go weird? I absolutely refuse to drink out of plastic now as I try and curb the effect.

Problem number Six.
Saturday 29th August 2014, just before 9:00 am. (New Zealand Standard time)

I don"t believe this. I had set up the auto replacement feature by putting in all the special characters from column one given on the table above. I had tested them one by one just after I enter the new characters, a couple of weeks after I had put this web page up and google had found this web page, I went to use 2/3 on the date time given above and guess what? I still had 2/3 when I got to the end of the story. Brilliant!

Problem number Six [about 4 hours later – fixed]
I went to "tools" (the drop down menu as seen in the picture above), at the very bottom is "Options" ⇒ "Language settings" ⇒ "Language" In the Default language for documents, make sure it is set to "English(USA)". I must of upset the settings while trying something else.

By the way if you make lots of changes and you want to either back up the file just in case it gets lost on a version update or want to transfer the *.DAT file on to another computer like around the home or work (if you take it to work, Always make sure you ask your boss first), go to "tools" ⇒ "Options" then go to "OpenOffice" ⇒ "Paths" to find the folder name where it lives on your computer. However this plan did not work, and I got sick of the 4.1.1 version, I uninstalled it and went back to version 4.1.0.