how to keep spellcheck on

[xppuser]

dear all,

windows xp pro sp2, office 2003 pro sp2,

i have searched for solution to my situation but what i found was people
wanting to turn-off spellcheck! i am writing a large document (at the moment,
it is up to pages 290 with 1.5 spacing). the most odd thing happened today
after i opened my document, instead of seeing sea of reds underlines
when/where there is mis-spelling, there was none. the spellchecker icon at
the bottom of the screen showed a cross so i know there is(are) mis-spelled
words. i have clicked and un-clicked hide spelling error to turn the
spellchecker back unsuccesfully.

i would appreciate advice and/or suggestion on how to turn the spellcheker
back on. contrary to a lot of the postings, i do find the spellchecker
feature incredibly useful.

thank you,
jess

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You might see http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/MasterSpellCheck.htm to see
if any of the explanations provided there apply to you.

 

[xppuser]

suzanne, thanks for your link. unfortunately none seems to apply in my case.
but here is what happened since i received your reply. after reading the link
and not having a solution, i decided to cut and paste, initially page by page
to a new document -> spellchecker automatically identified mis-spellings on
the new document. then i proceeded to do cut and paste more pages (at one
point, it was up to 10 pages at a time) and correct the spellings where there
were mis-spellings. at about page 90+, when i cut the pages, suddenly the
spellcheckers started to appear again on the remaining pages. most odd!

i tried this on my colleague's machine (same brand & set-up hardware &
software) and the outcome was the same. i wonder whether there was a
limitation of some sort to word 2003 spellchecking facilities that we should
spellcheck and correct as we go rather than waiting towards the end of
writing of the document.

anyway, my problem was unexpectedlly solved but would be glad to hear your
opinion.

thank you,
jes

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

This may depend on system resources available, but at some point, in a
document with many misspellings, Word will throw up a message saying, in
effect, "There are too many errors in this document. I can't keep track of
them any more, so I'm hiding them." It then checks the "Hide spelling errors
in this document" check box on the Spelling & Grammar tab of Tools | Options
(if you had checked, you would have seen that this option was enabled). You
can still use manual spell check to work your way through the document; when
you've corrected enough, you will be able to turn this option off (which you
can do by right-clicking the Spelling and Grammar Status button on the
status bar and deselecting Hide Spelling Errors).

BTW, I can reliably reproduce this error if I insert enough chunks of lorem
ipsum text (see http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/DummyText.htm) into a
document. Although my "lorem" AutoText entry is supposed to be formatted as
"Do not check spelling or grammar," this evidently didn't "take" the first
time I created the entry; I've fixed it now.

 

[xppuser]

thanks suzanne for your input. it's clearer now.

regards,
jes