Custom Dictionary is not available

[mwoods1]

Version: 2008
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
Processor: intel

I just received my new computer and Office 2008 a couple days ago and my spell/grammar check is not picking up my missed spelled words. I will intentionally miss spell words to see if it will work, but it does not notice the miss spelled words. I have made sure that under the Tools>Language section the 'do not check spelling or grammar' is not selected. Also I have gone under Preferences>Spelling and Grammar>Dictionaries to find that my Custom Dictionary is under that language English (US). I have been trying to find the answers in this forum, but have only read (and tried) the same thing over and over again, but still the custom dictionary is not available. What is wrong with this? I need help, please.

 

[CyberTaz]

Are you actually getting a message which states that the custom dictionary
is not available? You don't specifically say so. Have you tried the
suggestions offered elsewhere in this thread?

Have a look at the information & try the steps here:

http://word.mvps.org/Mac/SpellCheck.html

It sounds like you have text in the document which is formatted or "tagged"
as a language other than what the dictionary is looking for. Pay particular
attention to the topic "Spell-Check Doesn¹t Catch Misspelled Words". (Before
you ask one way this happens is by having pasted from another source.

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Are you actually getting a message which states that the custom dictionary
is not available? You don't specifically say so. Have you tried the
suggestions offered elsewhere in this thread?

Have a look at the information & try the steps here:

http://word.mvps.org/Mac/SpellCheck.html

The page mentions that the problam was solved in Office 11.2.
I suspect that this is a problem new to Office 2008 (and a lot more
people have seen it too).

It sounds like you have text in the document which is formatted or "tagged"
as a language other than what the dictionary is looking for. Pay particular
attention to the topic "Spell-Check Doesn't Catch Misspelled Words". (Before
you ask one way this happens is by having pasted from another source.

I've had the issue myself and a little bit of investigating told me that
Office 2008 had messed up my custom dictionaries from Office 2004.
I opened them up in BBEdit and I saw a myriad of encoding issues. THe
file encoding didn't make any sense and all letters were separated by
various sorts of gremlins.

I found three workarounds:
- trash the custom dictionary and start a new one (really sad when you
have a lot of terms in the CD).
- find the custom dictionary (CD) in the Finder, drag it to the icon for
Word in the Dock to open it there. If it looks more or less OK (as a
simple list of terms), make a modification aand save. This seems to fix
encoding issues.
- open the CD in a text editor, and copy all the terms there.
Create a new CD from Word, open it in a text Editor (or in Word) and
paste all the terms.



Corentin

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Corentin -

No doubt 2008 has "issues of its own" which have yet to be resolved, but I
did refer the poster to the earlier messages in the thread which include
some of your own suggestions... Pretty clever the 'drag to the icon'
trick! Also, take a look at the top of that page - the new title trailer;

Updated for Word 2008 (DRAFT in Progress)

I just figured that if all else failed it might be covered by that topic.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac