Grammar check impossible in french

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Likely sources of problem are:
* the Custom dictionary you are using,
* the User ID you are using,
* the Language you are using,
* the document you are using (tracked changes and special characters
particularly)
* the font you are using, and
* the keyboard you are using.

Some are more likely than others.
The Custom Dictionary can sure be a source of problem
It could also be a corruption in the install (requiring uninstalling and
reinstalling then updating Office) or in the user templates
(Normal.dotx).

Fonts and keyboards shouldn't make the grammar checking crash (but who
knows...),


Corentin

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Hi Johan,

Grammarcheck doesn't work in french for me since Day 1.
My machine is an iMac, new, and every other app I use in it work
flawlessly (60 + different apps).
Yours

Well I would say it doesn't work on *your* computer since day 1. It sure
is an issue, but not as widespread as you seem to believe.
I haven't seen simialr reports in the French MS newsgroup for Office Mac
either.

There is obviously something that makes spell checking crash on your
Mac.

By now, I would consider uninstalling Office completely, trashing the
user templates (at least Normal), reinstalling, re-updating all the way
and re-customizing the Normal template.
Somcething seems to be badly corrupted :-\


Corentin

 

[quantw]

Corentin,
"The Custom Dictionary can sure be a source of problem
It could also be a corruption in the install (requiring uninstalling and
reinstalling then updating Office) or in the user templates"

All this has been done on BOTH machines twice.
If that issue were so unfrequent, how come Msoft support
keeps telling it's a bug ?
Yours,
Johan

 

[quantw]

Likely sources of problem are:

* the Custom dictionary you are using,
* the User ID you are using,
* the Language you are using,
* the document you are using (tracked changes and special characters
particularly)
* the font you are using, and
* the keyboard you are using.

All of these have an effect on the "National Language" subsystem.

If you would like to zip up the crash log and send it to me, I can get the
developers to have a look: that would give us a better clue as to where the
issue may lie.

Hope this helps

Dear John,
I use the standard Mac french keyboard on both machines.
I work in French of France.
I use Times standard font (I have no fancy fonts installed, Msoft original Word fonts only)
User ID is sthan, like here.
And the crahs is not with one sentence or one document, but with any sentence and all documents.
And, I repeat, when calling Msoft support about it, they instantly told me (engineer level 2) it was a well known with Word 2008 in some languages. So I'm perplexed by what Corentin wrote before, telling it's not very frequent. ;-))
I'm currently abroad (reason I created another ID to access here, because the forum offers no method to retrieve my password… ;-)))
The crash report won't be of any help, because it's not a crash : it's a dialog saying "Word encountered a problem ; session is interrupted". So it's not Word crashing, it's just the
grammar check stopping to work. And that has been reported by MANY users, I can assure you, on several forums.
Yours
Johan

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Corentin,
"The Custom Dictionary can sure be a source of problem
It could also be a corruption in the install (requiring uninstalling and
reinstalling then updating Office) or in the user templates"

All this has been done on BOTH machines twice.
If that issue were so unfrequent, how come Msoft support
keeps telling it's a bug ?

I don't know what MS support is telling you.

The one bug I know of is that the custom dictionaries tend to
self-corrupt way too frequently.
Other than that, grammar checking in French works fine for me.

One of the methods that could be used to uncorrupt a custom dictionary
is to go to the Preferences, select the custom dictionary and use the
button to edit it in Word. In there, you can make a simple modification
(add then remove a space), then save.
That re-writes the file with proper file descriptors and usually
corrects the problem.

Since a regular install works just fine for me, I doubt that your
problems are related to a bug in the Office installation itself. By
deduction, it leads to one of the support files: Templates, Preferences,
Cache or Custom Dictionaries.

You might want to give it a try in a new, clean user account on your
Mac. If it doesn't crash there, it will confirm my suspicions.

Corentin

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Hi Johan,

And, I repeat, when calling Msoft support
about it, they instantly told me (engineer level 2) it was a well known
with Word 2008 in some languages. So I'm perplexed by what Corentin
wrote before, telling it's not very frequent. ;-))

No offense to our friends from MS but I haven't had good experiences
with their phone support in France in the past :->

Again, I have seen no such report in microsoft.public.fr.mac where
French-speaking Office:Mac users usually post.

I'm currently abroad
(reason I created another ID to access here, because the forum offers no
method to retrieve my password∑ ;-)))

Don't use the forum then. Use a regular Newsgroup client application.
These forums are simply mirroring microsoft.public.mac.office.word on
nntp://news.microsoft.com
You can also access the groups through the Google Groups interface.

The crash report won't be of any
help, because it's not a crash : it's a dialog saying "Word encountered
a problem ; session is interrupted". So it's not Word crashing, it's
just the grammar check stopping to work. And that has been reported by
MANY users, I can assure you, on several forums. Yours Johan

Do you have links I could try?? It could help me gather more info on the
source of the problem.
I tried searching for "Office 2008 correction grammaire problème" and
didn't find anything that seemed to be relevant.
I remember issues with the original release of Office 2008 (12.0.0), but
it should all have been corrected in the updates that came out since
then.
Again, in 12.1.5 it's working fine for me.


Corentin

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Johan:

Corentin is our resident expert on this problem ‹ he is a scientist and
native of France who works in French.

Corentin has the most up-to-date information on this issue. I think it's
fair to say that Corentin knows more about this bug than the Microsoft phone
support people do

These reports used to be common, up until the second service pack for the
French version, but since then, they dropped away a lot.

I use the standard Mac french keyboard on both machines.

If you have "match font with keyboard" turned on, every time you switch
keyboards to access a special character, Word switches languages. One of
the bugs is that it does not switch back again, leading to the text
containing languages the user didn't expect.

I work in French of France.

So does Corentin. I don't, so I tend to rely on what Corentin and Michel
say

I use Times standard font (I have no fancy fonts installed, Msoft original
Word fonts only)

Times standard, or Times New Roman? Which version of it (use Get Info on
the font file...) The reason I ask is that some fonts will crash Word.

User ID is sthan, like here.

My mistake: it's the "User Identity" that can go bad. In other words, it's
not the name you login with, it's the entire collection of files and folders
in the ~/Users folder that is suspect. If you create a new username login
on that machine, do you get the same problem in the new identity?

And the crahs is not with one sentence or one document, but with any sentence
and all documents.

That's important. If the problem was in the Normal template, it would be
only NEW documents. If it's also happening to documents created in Word
2004, it's not that.

And, I repeat, when calling Msoft support about it, they instantly told me
(engineer level 2) it was a well known with Word 2008 in some languages.

That's old information. The Microsoft Product Support System people are
reading the same database we are: they have no direct knowledge of the
problem. On the other hand, Corentin and I have been talking to the
software engineers who wrote the application.

I'm perplexed by what Corentin wrote before, telling it's not very frequent.

Recently, it's not. Corentin believes (and so do I...) that there is a
local problem on your computer that we haven't found yet. If this was a
problem with the Word 2008 code, the francophone newsgroups would be awash
with it, and they're not. They were when Office 2008 first came out, but
now we hardly ever see the issue.

The crash report won't be of any help, because it's not a crash : it's a
dialog saying "Word encountered a problem ; session is interrupted".

That's what we want: that will trigger an entry in the Word crash log.
That's the one we want. Word has actually branched to the error handler:
when it does, it will dump the processor stack trace to the log, and that's
what we need.

Hang in there: If we keep at this long enough, we will find it and you will
fix it

Cheers

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[sthan]

John,
Thank you for your patience.
I'm currently abroad and not with my main computer available.
I'll reply more extensively late sunday.
Hoping to finally solve that painful issue.
Yours
Johan

 

[sthan]

Corentin, John,
I made my homework. I found the proof it's a BUG (as many users reported it relative to other problems regarding Word 2008) :
I found this :
<http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=502753>
I applied that solution :
"The problem comes from "Spelling and Grammar..." which is set to 'Check spelling as you type' and 'Check grammar as you type' in the Preferences.
So just uncheck those. It should fix your problem.
And please, let me know if this works...
Thanks.
nono"

And now grammar check works.
Only it's a pain in the *** to have to think to check/uncheck grammar/ortho while typing, which
shouldn't occur in the first place if Msoft were
spending more money to fix bugs and less to launch
delusive ads. See what I mean ?

 

[sthan]

This is another bug :
<http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=471672&highlight=grammar+check>

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Corentin, John,
Hi,

I made my homework. I found the proof it's a BUG (as many users reported
it relative to other problems regarding Word 2008) :
I found this :
<http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=502753>

Look at the date: June 2008... It *was* a bug and this should not happen
with up to date versions of Office.
Again, I don;t have that issue. No one I know (who speak French)
experience that issue.

I applied that solution :
"The problem comes from "Spelling and Grammar..." which is set to 'Check
spelling as you type' and 'Check grammar as you type' in the
Preferences.
So just uncheck those. It should fix your problem.

It's checked for me and it works.
I *still* suspect there is something else wrong on your Mac.

Corentin

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

This is another bug :
<http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=471672&highlight=gr
mmar+check>

April 2008, even older.
This is old, really. It should have been fixed and you should not have
had these crashes.
Again, since the udpates came out, I haven't read *one* report about
these crashes.


Corentin

 

[sthan]

Corentin,
If it has been solved for all and everyone, how come last
posts on Mac Rumor still mentioned it last week ?

 

[Corentin Cras-Méneur]

Corentin,
If it has been solved for all and everyone, how come last
posts on Mac Rumor still mentioned it last week ?

True, you'll notice though that there has been no post between August
2008 and this one. You'll notice too that there is no reference to the
version of Office 2008 he/she is running.

If the updates haven't been properly installed, then of course you might
be affected - even now.

Don't you think that considering the number of French users groups like
fr.comp.sys.mac microsoft.public.fr.mac etc would be swamped with posts
on this topic if the bug was still there??

Corentin

 

[sthan]

Let's reverse the rationale just a minute here :
how come every solution I tried doesn't work with
my machine, which suffered of this problem since
Word 2008 has been installed, and that has never been solved with any update ?

 

[John McGhie]

Well... Ummm... Yeah...

That's like saying "The cure to a flickering light is to switch it off."
Sure stops the flickering, but it makes it really hard to see in the dark...
Unchecking Spelling and Grammar as you type simply switches off the spell
checker and grammar checker. I guess it will stop the crashes

I suggest to you that there is a problem, and it is on your machine.

If you want, we will try to help you to fix your machine.

If you want to carry on saying "It's a bug" then go ahead. It's not true,
but if it makes you feel better, by all means keep saying it. It won't
change anything, but if it makes you feel good, who am I to deny you your
pleasure?

Now: For those who are following along, Sthan better HOPE it's not a bug.
Because the time for bug fixes to Office 2008 is probably past. They are
building the next version now.

So Sthan, if you want to solve your problem, we will try to help. If you
want to keep saying it's a bug, be our guest!

Cheers

Corentin, John,
I made my homework. I found the proof it's a BUG (as many users reported it
relative to other problems regarding Word 2008) :
I found this :
<http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=502753>
I applied that solution :
"The problem comes from "Spelling and Grammar..." which is set to 'Check
spelling as you type' and 'Check grammar as you type' in the Preferences.
So just uncheck those. It should fix your problem.
And please, let me know if this works...
Thanks.
nono"

And now grammar check works.
Only it's a pain in the *** to have to think to check/uncheck grammar/ortho
while typing, which
shouldn't occur in the first place if Msoft were
spending more money to fix bugs and less to launch
delusive ads. See what I mean ?

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[John McGhie]

Who knows? There are an infinite number of possibilities.

For example:

* Because the FIRST installation was bad.

* Once files exist on the disk, they are not replaced by newer
installations unless you run the Remove Office tool to remove the existing
versions.

* However, chances are this error is in a user-created file, which does not
exist on the disk or in any of the updates. "User-created" in this sense
covers .plists, .com, templates, dictionaries... Anything that is created
either by you or at run-time.

* Again, running the Office Remover will take it out if the bad file is
part of Office. It may not be: the file may be part of OS X, or it may be a
conflict with another application.

* Or it could be that when you did the Removal sequence, you did not follow
the whole thing in order. If you remove some preferences but not others,
the fault is simply transferred from one to the other at next run.

Whatever; if you try this, it might fix it:

This is the "Scorched Earth" fix.

Whatever it is, if it's caused by Office, this should fix it. Warning: the
sequence is important ‹ for this to have the best chance of working, you
need to do the whole thing, in sequence. If you skip steps because you have
already done them, chances are it won't work.

First: Download and re-apply the latest Apple OS X Combo Update from here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=search&src=support_site.kbase&fac=Dow
nloads&q=Mac%20OS%20X%20Combo

Test now: that may fix it. If not: I am picking that one of the components
of your software has gotten out of synch with the others.

1) Quit all Microsoft applications.

Run the Remove Office utility. You must run Remove Office, or you'll make
the problem worse! And Office must be installed WHEN you run it, otherwise
Remove Office will do nothing because it can't find what it's looking for.

2) Run Remove Office TWICE to make sure it finds everything. Remove Office
is in a folder on your CD, and is also in a folder in your Office 2008
Application folder.

3) Track down all instances of pre-2008 Normal template on your computer,
and drag them to your desktop. The file is called simply "Normal" and has
no extension.

4) Find and drag the file Normal.dotm to your desktop. Unless you have
moved it, it should be in
/Users/ ~ /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/

5) If the following files exist, Remove or rename them:

~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Settings (10)

~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Word Settings (11)

User/Library/Preferences/com.Microsoft.Word.plist

User/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008 (the whole folder!)

Then Repair Permissions with Disk Utility.

Then re-install, and reapply the 12.1.0 and 12.1.5 updates, in that order.

Repair permissions again, and it should work.

Be thorough with this, if you leave any of the old files behind Word 2008
will find them and won't replace them. Do it right and Word will construct
a new, clean, set of preferences and everything should now work.

Cheers

Let's reverse the rationale just a minute here :
how come every solution I tried doesn't work with
my machine, which suffered of this problem since
Word 2008 has been installed, and that has never been solved with any update ?

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]

 

[sthan]

Joh,
Thx for your patience.
I will do that when having time.
Note that I've already; thoroughly done everything you suggested, except # 2 and # 3.
I'll let you know.
Yours
Johan

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Johan:

Yes, it's a pain in the "A" and a lot of work. Sorry about that.

The problem is that the reference and settings files are not on the install
disk, and are never removed or replaced when you re-install.

But those are the files that most often fail, because they are the only ones
that get written to.

Cheers

Joh,
Thx for your patience.
I will do that when having time.
Note that I've already; thoroughly done everything you suggested, except # 2
and # 3.
I'll let you know.
Yours
Johan

--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/

Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP, Word and Word:Mac
Sydney, Australia. mailto:[email protected]