macro to replace exclude dic

[Raymond RUSSELL]

Hello all

My WORD exclude dictionary (several hundred entries)
was a vital step in ensuring the quality of my texts.
It has not worked for over a year now;
I've tried everything the experts have suggested
- to no avail.
I've given up for the moment and started looking for alternatives.

I was wondering whether more or less the same job
might perhaps be performed by means of a macro.

This would involve checking my working text (doc file)
against this (fairly long) exclude dictionary (text file)
pausing whenever an entry is found to allow me to make any necessary
corrections.
Is this possible ? If so, can anyone give a few tips ?

Thanks in advance from Ray

 

[Word Heretic]

G'day "Raymond RUSSELL" <[email protected]>,

Whoa! Crack a coldie and sit back bloke. Here, I'll do one for you...

pffffft. Gurgle gurgle gurgle.... AHhhhhhhhhh

If you are lucky it is merely your custom.dic is too big, split it in
twain, add the new one and you're back in the shack.

If not, I swear, print this out, have a beer in your hand, and then
read on. Its messy, and will get your head to rumbling with lots of
questions that will settle during the course of the beer, much like
mud out of a Coopers. I strongly suspect you need to change your work
methodology.

This list of exclude words... you have a large set of words that you
want marked as incorrect every time. I imagine this is for stylistic
purposes. One should never use one's impersonal first person mode for
one's writing no matter what. So we want to mark "one" "ones" and so
on as incorrect every time to ensure we catch oneself in one's
phrasing.

If you are using any entries in this exclude file for other purposes
then you need to use something else more suitable. www.editorium.com
has a number of useful tools for stuff right next door to your
problem.

So, first obvious step is to check if your exclude file is too large.
Cut it in half, keep the other half aside in a txt file for
safekeeping, see if exclude works again.

If it does we have a problem, and yes, vba could easily solve your
problems here in numerous ways. My first tendency would be to look at
the words in the exclude file and see if they fall into groups that
could potentially be differentiated by style used to instance those
words. If so, hell, set that style to a close language and set up a
new exclude file for that language!

My second method would be to set up your own library of excludes, and
slowly switch them in and out during a defined Task until complete.
This creates a fistful of secondary problems, so it's only for
specific solution sets.

Method 3 would be to, as you suggest, use VBA to manually highlight or
otherwise mark the words from a library of exclude files. The library
makes it easier to maintain for you.

Good luck,

Steve Hudson - Word Heretic
Want a hyperlinked index? S/W R&D? See WordHeretic.com

steve from wordheretic.com (Email replies require payment)


Raymond RUSSELL reckoned: