Hi Madelaine:
Yes, there is an absurd bug that makes the operation a little complicated,
but you can do it
You need to follow these instructions fairly
carefully: otherwise they won't work.
1) Delete your existing custom dictionary (use Word to find it, then quit
ALL Microsoft applications and delete it using the Finder).
All the Office applications hold the custom dictionary in memory while they
are running, if you don't quit them all, they will write the bad one back to
the disk as soon as they quit.
2) Start Word and create a NEW custom dictionary. Make sure you set it to
"No Language" so that it will contain spellings from any text you handle.
3) Copy your custom dictionary from the old PC and drop it somewhere on
your Mac that you can find it.
4) Open the old custom dictionary in TextEdit and use the "Make Plain Text"
command to convert the dictionary to plain Unicode.
5) Copy the entire text of the old dictionary.
6) Open the new custom dictionary by choosing Word>preferences>Spelling and
Grammar>Custom Dictionaries>Edit...
You must open it exactly that way or this won't work...
7) Paste into the custom dictionary.
8) Check the custom dictionary for blank lines.
Turn on your paragraph marks so that you can see what you are doing. You
must remove them ALL, or the dictionary won't work. You can use
Find/Replace to do this: Search for ^p^p and replace with ^p.
9) SAVE the custom dictionary.
10) Turn your spelling back on (it was automatically disabled when you
edited the dictionary).
Should work now... Of course, you have to ensure that the text language in
the documents you want to check is set correctly. And it is important to
set the custom dictionary language to "none" so that it is available for all
29 different English languages (including American....)
The issue seems to be that the custom dictionary is picking up some
formatting that it should not contain, and Word has no way to suppress it.
Even though the custom dictionary is a plain text file, Word saves it as a
document to ensure that it can contain Unicode characters.
Hope this helps
Ok, fair enough. Here's the deal.
So - I have a three month old MacBook running on Leopard. I'm using Office
2008 for Mac, using only English. I brought documents over from my old PC,
but not any dictionaries. That was three months ago, and the problem has
only recently arisen.
I have tried dragging the Custom dictionary from the Finder into Word and
making a minor change, then saving it. No luck.
I have tried going into the dictionary (through word) and changing the
language to (none) and saving changes. I also checked through tools
->language that is was on English (Australia). It was, but it didn't work.
I have tried deleting the Custom dictionary and adding again. No dice.
I would love to know if there are any other options, and if not, what next?
Thanks
Madelaine
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John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Nhulunbuy, NT, Australia. mailto:
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