Grammar Checker

[Tim]

I needed to reinstall Word 2004 a couple of nights ago and today I
noticed that spell and grammar checker is not working. First grammar
checker. Under the preferences the "Hide grammatical errors in this
document is checked", but EVERYTHING under grammar is also grayed out.
I have tried it in new documents, but nothing works.

Under Spelling, I have the "check spelling as you type" but I
intentially made a document with misspelled words and then ran tools,
spell checker, and it came back saying spell check was complete. I am
stumped. My custom dictionary is gone (all my custom words are gone)
too, but I will worry about that later.
This is on Word2004 v11.2 running Mac 10.4.2.

 

[Michel Bintener]

Hi there,
you are talking about two different problems, the first one is grammar/spell
check related, the other one is your custom dictionary, so let's address
them in that order.

To get a more precise answer, it would be good if you could state what
language you use. The fact that the grammar section is greyed out normally
indicates that there is no grammar checker for the language defined for the
text you're working on. So, select some text, go to Tools>Language, and
select the language you want. Also, make sure that the "Do not check
spelling or grammar" checkbox is empty; if there's a tick or a dash in that
box, click on it until it disappears. Does the spell/grammar checker work
now? If so, then everything's fine. The next step is then to go to
Tools>Language again, select your preferred language, then hit the default
button. If you now start a new document, it will be in that language, and
the problems you experienced should not (hopefully) show up anymore.

You're not saying why you had to reinstall Word, or how you did it, i.e. are
your old Word settings still available on a different hard drive? If there
is any way you can access your previous installation, then you should be
able to retrieve your custom dictionary. Read this article here to find out
more about its precise location, and also about other settings which you
might want to import:

http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/BackUpPrefs.htm
(Hit "Refresh" several times when using Safari, or, preferably, use a
different browser to view that webpage)

Hope this was helpful.
Michel

 

[Tim]

I have/had English set up and that did not do it. The reason for the
reinstall was I tried to install some sort of VBA tool and after I did,
it scrambled (e.g. came up with error messages) Word, Excel, etc. when
I opened them. I only left the application files when I did the
install, but I have an old copy of the custom dictionary backup at
home.

 

[Michel Bintener]

Okay, so we know that the language setting is not the problem. When you
uninstalled Office, did you use Microsoft's Remove Office tool
(Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Additional Tools/Remove Office)? In case
you did not, this may have left some of the corrupted files on your hard
disk. If you haven't removed Office properly, I'd suggest doing so at once
and then reinstalling it from scratch; this will hopefully solve the
problem.

Also, just out of interest, does the problem affect all the files you're
working on, or only older ones?

 

[Tim]

I used the uninstal tool. This affects both old and new files. Reinstal
is my final option, but that will have to happen tonight. For now, I
have a paper to write and I can copy the file over to appleworks to run
spell/grammar checker.

 

[Michel Bintener]

Hold on, Tim, I think I found the solution. I had a look at the Word MVP
website which I referred you to earlier on, and here's a link that you
should find particularly interesting:
http://word.mvps.org/macwordnew/spell-checkcontent.htm#GrayPrefs
Read the section about greyed out preferences, and follow the instructions
on how to solve the problem. Again, when using Safari, hit refresh several
times to view the page, or use any other browser.
Now, let's hope you'll post back saying that everything worked out! Good
luck!

Michel

 

[Tim]

Thanks Michael for finding the article and your persistence and
patience. It did appear that there was some language mismatching in the
Proofing Tools subdirectory. So I deleted all of them and reinstalled
the proofing tools (in English). Now to go find my custom dictionary.
One thing that bothers me is that under my Office directory, I see
English Dictionary and English Dictionary 2. Is this correct?

 

[Michel Bintener]

Yes, that's normal, though it's not really related to the custom dictionary,
which you can find in ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft. But yes, you should
have two, even though I can't tell you why.