Fine-Tuning the Word Completion for Text Documents

If you like it that LibreOffice automatically completes the words that you frequently use, you can make further adjustments to refine that behavior. If you want, you can also save the current list of collected words so that it can be used in the next session.

To fine-tune the word completion choose Tools – AutoCorrect Options - Word Completion and select any of the following options:

To Insert an Additional Space Character

Select Append space.

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The space character is appended after you type the first character of the next word after the auto-completed word. The space character is suppressed if the next character is a delimiter, such as a full stop or a new line character.


To Define the Accept Key

Choose the key to accept the suggested word using the Accept with list box.

To Select the Minimum Number of Characters

Use the Min. word length box to set the minimum number of characters a word must have to be collected into the list.

To Select the Scope of Collected Words

Disable the option When closing a document, remove the words collected from it from the list.

Now the list is also valid for other documents that you open. When you close the last LibreOffice document, the word list is deleted.

If you enable the checkbox, the list is only valid as long as the current document is open.

If you want the word list to exist longer than the current LibreOffice session, save it as a document, as described in the following section.

To Use the Word List for Further Sessions

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If the automatic spellcheck option is enabled, only the words that are recognized by the spellcheck are collected.


Use the word list to always start with a defined set of technical terms for the word completion feature.

  1. Open the text document that contains the terms that you want to use for word completion.

    The word completion feature collects the words.

  2. Select all or some of the words in the list.

  3. Use +C to copy all selected words into the clipboard. Paste the clipboard into a new document and save it to get a reference list of collected words.

    Later you can open the reference list and automatically collect the words, so that the word completion feature starts with a defined set of words.