David Naylor: Blog

Web Browsers, Photography & Stuff

17 January 2007

Back in September of 2005 I was moaning about how the spell checker in OpenOffice sucks. Sadly, it hasn't improved since then.

Heck, Firefox has a much better spell checker for its text fields.

I have to moan some more about this expensive software:

There is no simple way of binding a certain character to a keyboard shortcut. You have to record a macro which inserts the character, and then edit the macro with a text editor so that it works independent of which font you happen to be using. Finally, you bind the macro to a keyboard shortcut.
The upgrade process is awful! Why are all my settings obliterated when I install a new version? Obviously, this really puts me off upgrading. I could live with there being no binary update, but I would like it if I could at least install a point upgrade without losing all my settings and dictionaries.
Page numbering anyone? Could it be more complicated and non-intuitive?

At 12:00 PM, Anonymous said…

Firefox uses Openoffice.org's spellchecker. I don't imagine they had time to make extensive changes. Personally, I like the spellchecker - it does a better job for spelling mistakes than MS Office in my experience.
At 12:03 PM, David Naylor said…

The difference is that in Firefox the spellchecker just works. Have you tried changing the document language in Openoffice? Have you tried installing new dictionaries? It's hopelessly awkward.