coverting a custom dictionary from Office X to office 2003?

[The Enforcer]

Does anyone know how I can take my custom dictionary from Office X on
my Mac so my wife can use it in Office 2003 on her PC, this is a custom
dictionary we have been adding into for years with all the medical
terms we use (medical transcription).

I tried taking the custom dictionary from the Mac and renaming it to
Custom.dic for the PC, but the PC didn't use any of the words from it.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Use WinOffice 2003 to look up how to create a custom dictionary there.

Renaming Custom.dic may have worked, but you would also need to officially
Add it as a custom dictionary in WinWord--probably via Tools | Options,
Spelling and Grammar, click on Custom Dictionaries, use that dialog to load
the file. Alternatively, it's possible the file was not in the right
location for WinWord.

In MacWord, it's just a text file, assuming WinOffice is similar, you might
have better luck opening the two text files and copying and pasting the text
between them than just switching over the file.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Yeah, Daiya is right -- the Custom Dictionary is just a text file, you can
simply copy it over to Word 2003.

If you are really brave, you can even share it with Word 2003, but you may
find that the dictionary is then read-only on the second computer to start
each day.

You would have to make sure that you overwrite the PC's copy, that it is not
set to a language, and that it is in the correct place.

It's easier to simply take the file over to the PC, open it in Notepad, copy
the content, choose Edit Custom Dictionary in Word 2003, then paste the text
into the Word 2003 custom dictionary.

That ensures that everything lines up the way it's supposed to do.

Generally, the key to it is to ensure that your Custom Dictionary is set to
"No Language" or "None" before playing with it. If you wanted to "use" a
Mac-generated Custom Dictionary in Word 2003, you may need to edit it in
Word 2003, add and remove a space, then re-save the file. This re-writes
the Creator Code in the file to what Word 2003 is expecting.

Hope this helps

Does anyone know how I can take my custom dictionary from Office X on
my Mac so my wife can use it in Office 2003 on her PC, this is a custom
dictionary we have been adding into for years with all the medical
terms we use (medical transcription).

I tried taking the custom dictionary from the Mac and renaming it to
Custom.dic for the PC, but the PC didn't use any of the words from it.

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410