Note: if you just want a quick answer to the subject of this post (with no background story), then go to the end.

I had a customer that urgently needed to get his old win98 PC fixed.

It was a very old IBM, and it would get stuck at startup, displaying B4 in the top corner (probably a motherboard failure).

I transfer the data across to a slightly newer XP system… I can edit & print documents, so my job is done.

But I get called back the next day, as wordpad doesn’t have a “page counter”, nor a spell checker (which was on the old PC… I eventually figure out he was using MS word.

Customer doesn’t have any install media (his son set it up a while ago).

So I figure OpenOffice is the quickest solution.

Once installed, I open an existing word document, and I see it does the usual spell check, with the wavy red line under suspect words.

And running the spell check finds some spelling mishtakes.

I open a new office document, make some deliberate mis-spellings, but OOowriter doesn’t flag any of them… WTF?

After some research, I find that openoffice only installs the spell checker for US and UK English.

The problem will happen with any of the following english variants:

• Australia
• Belize
• Canada
• Eire
• India
• Jamaica
• Namibia
• New Zealand
• Philippines
• South Africa
• Trinidad
• Zimbabwe

The easiest fix is to use either USA english or UK english by:

start writer -> tools -> options -> Language Settings -> Languages -> Default languages for documents -> western -> pick either english (UK) or english (USA) -> OK -> restart openoffice.

A more “correct” way of doing it is to install the correct dictionary by:

start writer -> file ->wizards -> install new dictionaries -> english -> start dicOOo button -> English -> next -> retrieve the list -> English (Australia) -> (repeat for hyphenation dictionaries and thesaurus dictionaries -> next (to start the download) -> finish -> restart OOo