Seriously, how is this product considered usable?

So as you know, I've had to send out a resume or two lately - which it turns out has been riddled with typos and spelling errors. Usually my spelling is pretty good, but these days we come to trust tools like spell checkers and the like. This time though, even though it was set to underline errors, there were none (except for on things like 'JRun' or my email address, which led me to believe it was working just fine) - and when running a full scan, it came back with nothing.

Just had an email back from a mate with a list of half a dozen - ran it through Word, it caught all of them.

My fault for not going over it thoroughly, but man... that's bloody annoying.

Not happy.

I no longer use OpenOffice for that very reason, I used to copy paste documents from openoffice to Gmail to spell check.

purchased software > free s***

stolen software > *

Learning how to spell and proof-read yourself > *

Do you have the Australian dictionaries installed and configured?

What were some of the words it wasn't picking up? I want to test my OpenOffice to see if it finds them.

trog,

Unnecesary
Targetting
Targetted
Maintanence
Egineering
Largescale should be large-scale

Man, this post (in Firefox) is riddled with red dots.

i'm an egineer

being able to spell, priceless.

i thoguht u were a cad mokney ?

I have seen the problem. For no reason the dictionary just stop working.
It was working, now its not. No one has played with anything.

And unfortunately the response from the open office community is "its a user fault" and some complicated playing with settings and reinstalling compoonents.

While I might agree if it was rare, everyone I got to use Open Office has complained the spelling stops working. And the offical fix is both unreliable and not noob friendly.

rofl @ numerous resume spelling errors

I'm curious to know what version of oo you are using?
I am using 2.3 here and at work they are pushing oo for internal documentation as a standard so not everyone has to have ms office licenses.
I typed all the ones your oo missed and mine picked up every single one with correct recommendations.
One issue I had was with visio telling me enrolment and oo/ff telling me enrollment (maybe US/AUS difference) but thats about it.

Formatting a document is a nightmare in oo though. It remains to try and automate things but it is completely stupid.

Oh yeh, I remember this problem after reading Obes' post and testing it myself. It's like the dictionary just vanishes.

Agree that its totally balls.

Raven: try Abiword, it's a lightweight open source word processor that is really nice to use for simple things. Might not be uber enough if you're trying to do hardcode doc work but it's pretty good for simple things.

haha yeah i am gaz, planning on changing that next year probably

i use Open Office and <3 it

Raven: try Abiword, it's a lightweight open source word processor that is really nice to use for simple things. Might not be uber enough if you're trying to do hardcode doc work but it's pretty good for simple things.

Unfortunately when I said 'Open Office' I actually meant 'Neo Office', which is a Mac OS X native-ized version of Open Office. But it's still an OO core.

i open your mum's orifice and she <3's it

haha, paveway, now my number1 source for mum gags on the intenrst

I just followed this guide (for US dictionaries) and now my spellchecking is working again.

In a nutshell:

1) Open up the file: C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 2.4\share\dict\ooo\dictionary.lst in a text editor

2) Replace the contents with the following:

DICT en US en_US
HYPH en US hyph_en_US
THES en US th_en_US_v2

(I suspect if you have AU dictionaries you can do it with AU instead of US; I tried but either don't have the AU dicts installed, or that doesn't work

3) Save the file

4) Restart OO

Now my spellcheck works again

edit: just installed the AU dictionaries from this page and now I have AU spellchecking

last edited by trog at 13:40:21 26/May/08

Hmm. I just got it working again, my method was different:
Re-install/upgrade to 2.2.3 and install patch 4.

I also added the Australian dictionary for OS X, which hadn't been installed.

And now it works. Sigh.

Can I just add that I have seen the spell checker just stop working on MS office aswell.

do it pave, being a draftable engineer is very useful for starting ur own business down the track.. then you can start charging ludicrusly high fees for the simplest of tasks!

hoping to move into a construction engineer type of thing next year, look after my own sub division aswell as drafting

well going to put it to my boss this review coming up next month

i open your mum's orifice and she <3's it

a failure of epic proportions only paveway could dream up.

there there big guy

there there big guy

That's what your mum said to me last night.

cause you couldn't give her an orgasm?