I have LibreOffice ver. 3.4.2 and the spell checker does NOT work. Apparently this has been a problem for many users. What do I have to do to get a working spell checker? Do I have to fall back to ver. 3.3.3?
Please help.
Thanks,
Mark
Not working out of the box in 2015…
Well it’s lovely going through all this but in debian, ubuntu and mint if the above does not work try this
sudo apt-get install myspell-en-gb
It worked for me after hours of being very very irritated. Funny thing is Chrome’s spell checking worked. Also as an N.B replace -en-gb with your language i.e. -es (spanish) -fr (french) en-us (american take on the english language)
Brilliant!
After many times finding LibO spell-check not working at all and trying to find a solution, this time you hit the nail on the head.
I would add that before doing it I closed LibO, although I’m not sure what may have happened with it open.
Cheers.
sudo apt-get install myspell-en-us works great
However, the document dictionary must be set to the same dictionary that gets installed
Doc must be set to the same dictionary, one cannot Add to Dictionary when a word is found that is not in the doc. Then spellchecker works, hooray!
This happened to me recently in Version 3.5.2 Build ID: 165a79a-7059095-e13bb37-fef39a4-9503d18 in Windows 7 Pro.
Renaming the folder ‘bundled’ worked. By why did I have to do this if it’s supposingly fixed in v3.4.4?
Probably related to → Bug 37195 - Dictionary access lost after LibO upgrade –
Status: CLOSED FIXED (LibreOffice 3.4.4)
Solutions
(1) Workaround
- Close LibO (+ Quickstarter, if enabled).
- Go to your user profile: rename the folder bundled
[path: …\3\user\extensions\bundled], e.g.: to bundled_old, or remove this folder. - Restart LibO:
A new folder bundled will be created in the user profile.
All bundled dictionaries will be available.
(2) Best solution
Install a current version → LibreOffice 3.5.1 / LibreOffice 3.4.6
This solution worked for me. The file is in the AppData\Roaming folder in your main user profile in Windows.
Deleting the Bundled folder didn’t work. Reinstalling didn’t work.
I found that I had my LibreOffice Writer default language set to English (New Zealand). There is no dictionary for my locality of English.
The problem is fixed by clicking Tools/Options/Language Settings/Languages
It allows dozens of flavours of English, BUT spelling is disabled for all the ones that don’t have the little blue tick ABC icon beside them. Looks like we can LABEL text any of hundreds of languages, but only a few of them have dictionaries installed.
Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” Alternatively, “Do not invoke conspiracy as explanation when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence.”
Missing spell check support en-NZ has been fixed in LibreOffice 3.6.x,
Using LibreOffice Win7/32 recently updated to 3.6 I had the same problem. Ticking dictionaries made no difference. Using the latest LibreOffice made no difference. Deleting the “bundled” directory (actually moved to temporary storage) worked. There were a great many differences between the old and the re-created directory (but I didn’t check them in detail).
Linux only
changed sudo apt-get install myspell-en-gb
to
sudo apt-get install myspell-en-au
worked well for me. I replaced -gb with -au for australia and it downloaded language. I shut down LO and restarted it. All worked ok.
The reason I think. My locality is set to Australia. Australia language is not downloaded on to cd install image by default. Also, I found changing my locality to GB or USA in Tools/Options/Language Settings/Languages also worked. I had to change currency to USA as Australia uses dollars not pounds. Changing the language to usa or gb should work for windows too but I can’t confirm that. Gave up on Bill and windows after he made too many changes to new versions of windows for no apparent reason. I suppose Bill had to change the operating system to sell more books to teach us what we already knew.
If you are reading this in a forum post it will not be spell checked the same way that your LibreOffice or OpenOffice would do it on your PC. To view it that way download it from:
this Google link
to your PC and open it from there.
You will get the gist of what I mean by reading this post, but you will not see what I mean unless you download the file (or create your own file in your office suite).
Below are two blocks of text that have different language formatting.
one
twoz: twoz does not get spell checked because its language is [none]
three
one
twoz: twoz gets spell checked (and fails) because its language is [English (USA)]
three
To see the language that is being used: highlight a block of text and go to the menu: Format → Character.
There are hidden language settings for blocks of text, the whole current file and new files created from scratch.
When you are working on a file: Changing language settings from within a file through the menu system like so: Tools→Options, then “Language Settings” will only change the setting for the document that you are working on (or that you newly create from within the editor).
To change the language settings for all future newly created files you must use the same method (Tools→Options, then “Language Settings”), but do it from the configuration program LibreOffice (soffice.exe). Note; that the program will refuse to run (without giving any explanation or warning message) until you close all instances of any of the office suite programs.
Another way to “fix” a file with problematic language settings is through the menu:
Tools→Language→For Selection
Or Tools→Language→For Paragraph
Or Tools→Language→For all Text
There is no way to “fix” all effected files on your system. Unless somebody has written a program that I don’t know about.
Happy holidays to all.
sudo apt-get install myspell-en-au
Worked for me too. Initially I had installed Mint 14 without downloading languages. Installed package via Synaptic. Thanks for the solution.