OpenOffice.org Help TNT: Tips'n'Tricks that somehow didn't make it to the help (yet).

It's not difficult to check the spelling of text in several languages in your Writer document.
You need to have the spellcheck libraries for all the languages. Several languages may be preinstalled already, and many more language files are available on the Web.

To check the installed language libraries

• Choose Tools - Options - Language Settings - Writing Aids, then click the topmost Edit button.

Language libraries are separated in up to three parts:

• Spelling
• Hyphenation
• Thesaurus

Scroll through the Language list box and check for which language you have which of the three libraries installed. For some languages only one or two libraries are available.

To setup OOo for using additional languages

See the Adding More Languages blog entry.

To set the default text language

• Choose Tools - Options - Language Settings - Languages and set the default language for documents.
  

To assign another language as text attribute

1. Select some text, choose Format - Character - Font.
2. Select the language with the Language list box. Select [None] to exclude the selected text from all spellchecking and automatic hyphenation.

If you work with text in different languages more often, you may want to define some styles for the different paragraphs or characters.

1. For example, press F11 to open the Styles and Formatting window, then define a new Character Style for french text (Right-click, choose New).
   
2. Select the words that are french in your text, then double-click your new French style in the Styles and Formatting window.

Spellcheck settings

Some settings can be changed to fine-tune the spellcheck feature.

• Choose Tools - Options - Language Settings - Writing Aids and look at the Options area near the bottom.
• Click any of the Options entries, then click the Help button for an explanation.