Occasionally I am trying to write in Spanish, and I thought the easiest way to achieve the necessary accents (such as ó or ñ) would be to use AutoCorrect.

I went to Tools>Autocorrect>AutoCorrect Options and instructed it to replace o[ with ó. My intentions were to enter similar instructions for the other accents, but on trying the first one, it only "sort of " worked!

Opening a document and typing o[ did give me ó (which OpenOffice promptly capitalized) but when I tried typing accio[n (expecting acción) nothing happened.

Am I missing something obvious?

Afterthought:

Part of the reason I was trying this line of attack was that I was having difficulty accessing third-level characters with my keyboard. That problem is now solved, and I can write Spanish badly to my hearts content--but I am still curious if AutoCorrect could be used in such a manner.

It appears there are some limitations to auto correct in libreoffice writer. It should just work. You might want to file a report to them. Maybe you can't replace 2 characters with just one. I'm not sure.