Flesch-Kincaid fix?

[Debzz]

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

Is there are fix yet for the problem with the Flesch-Kincaid readability scale issue in Word 2008? I write for a living and I am supposed to provide readability stats with each article. I also provide SMOG, but I need the Word scale too. Any news?

 

[Debzz]

Oops...I meant to say "Is there a fix..."

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

I checked it the other day and it appeared to have been fixed--Word 2004
and 2008 returned the same results on my test doc. Regardless, you
should install the 12.1 and 12.1.1 updates.

 

[Debzz]

Hi Dalya, I just bought Office 2008 so I didn't even know there were updates. Thank you for the info! I installed both of them, and unfortunately the problem persists. It is intermittent--sometimes Word provides the stats and sometimes it doesn't. Very frustrating. I've double checked all the preferences too. Any other ideas?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Not providing the stats wasn't the problem--the problem was that the
stats were wrong. So I haven't a clue about your issue.

You have to let spellcheck run to the very end to get the stats, I
think, as well as making sure "show readability stats" is checked in
prefs. If you have footnotes or something, you need to let it check the
main document, then go through all the footnotes, before spellcheck is
really done.

Try to identify a pattern to when the stats don't show--long documents?
doc vs docx?

 

[Debzz]

I think I have at least come up with a work around. My client doesn't have the new version of Word, so I have had to save everything with a .doc suffix instead of .docx If I do a "save as" to the .docx, delete the references and sidebars, and then run the spell check...it actually works! Except, Word keeps crashing. It has probably crashed 8 times in the last hour. Each time it does, the "check spelling preference" unchecks itself, and so part of my routine is to go to preferences before I run the spell check.

I just have run the disk utilities and rebooted to see if that helps...

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Something sounds a bit screwed up on your machine. Word 2008 is showing
readability statistics on .doc files fine here. Although I don't know
what you mean by references and sidebars? Are there Tracked Changes in
these documents? Word could be tripping on those, conceivably.

If you aren't using Change Tracking/Reviewing/Markup features, then see
if following the links here about the Normal Template or Damaged
Preferences helps any.
http://word.mvps.org/Mac/TroubleshootingIndex.html