Can Spell Checker be persuaded to ignore words containing certain characters?

[JonathanT]

I'm working on some huge documents and trying to get Word's spellchecker
to ignore words that have underscores in them. We have lots of code
variables containing underscores. This doesn't seem to be in the
options and I've tried to add it to the custom dictionary along with
wildcard characters, e.g. *_* - similar to what you might search for in
a Windows search. Nothing is working for me.

Does anyone know whether you can get Word to ignore words containing a
certain string of characters?

Thanks!
Jonathan

 

[Robert M. Franz [RMF]]

Hello Jonathan

I'm working on some huge documents and trying to get Word's spellchecker
to ignore words that have underscores in them. We have lots of code
variables containing underscores. This doesn't seem to be in the
options and I've tried to add it to the custom dictionary along with
wildcard characters, e.g. *_* - similar to what you might search for in
a Windows search. Nothing is working for me.

Does anyone know whether you can get Word to ignore words containing a
certain string of characters?

language on spelling options are a character property in Word. You can
format one Word in your sentence to be in a different language, or tell
Word not to spell check it.

So, one way would be to assign, say, a character style with "no
proofing" to the variables (or, if we're talking of lines and lines of
code instead of some variable names in normal paragraphs, using a "code"
paragraph style set to "no proofing").

If you have a large existing document where you want to automate the
assignment of a style, you might write a little macro -- but doing this
is probably at least as time consuming as adding the relevant words to
your dictionary of words to ignore ...

HTH
Robert