Autocorrect

[RETINACONSULTATIONS]

I am having a problem with my autocorrect. I've added all the words that I want replaced and everything works well when I "apply while typing" , however when I have a document and need to apply the corrections much more than the words are changed. The entire format of the document changes, the margins change, the words that were in bold are unbolded.

[acknak]

I don't think the "apply autocorrect to the whole document" path is going to work for you.

For reasons mysterious to everyone other than the OOo developers, the manual application of autocorrect also applies a different paragraph style to every paragraph. I expect this style change is also the cause of the lost bold formatting.

At any rate, the feature is not practically useful in most cases.

If you just need to apply a batch series of replacements, there may be an extension for that. The "AltSearch" extension will do it; there may be others that are more focused on your situation.

[RoryOF]

From memory, Autocorrect applied to a whole document will process only Default Style and convert it to Text Body (as a sign it has been processed). It can be extremely dangerous to use and I strongly advise against it. If the various parameters are correctly set to your choice and the wind is in the east [Joke: reference Mary Poppins] it can automatically format a plain text, but may get very confused over anything more complex than that.

[acknak]

[The poster asked me off-thread if I knew of any alternative to AltSearch. I wanted to answer in public, so here goes]

I hesitated to mention AltSearch just because it is so obtuse.

I don't know of any extensions just for your purpose. You can search on the extension site, or just try a Google search.

If that doesn't lead anywhere, you can try asking on the macros area of the forum: http://forum.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewforum.php?f=20. Your task may be simple enough that someone will make a macro program to handle your task.

Actually, now that I write that, there's no reason you can't ask for someone to help you get Alt Search to do what you need.

Just some thoughts ... someone else may have a better suggestion.

[Bill]

I filed a bug report after this happened to me years ago. The bug report was "Closed Wontfix". I haven't tried to use Autocorrect > Apply since.

Bug 72339 - Format - Autoformat - Apply always replaces Default style with Text Body style