Mysterious Blue Underlines Fixed!

[Poliwog]

Hi!

I had a problem with wavy blue underlines appearing in Word 2007.
According to some MS KB docs I was referred to by folks on this list,
they indicated formatting mistakes. Only they didn't. They seemed to
be flagging spelling errors on correctly spelled words. When they
flagged 'fear' in the Biblical phrase "I will fear no evil" I had had
it. Finally, I found the problem. WBUs are _also_ used to indicate
"contextual spelling errors". You know, like "John and Mary got in
they're car." Only the implementation leaves, er, something to be
desired. So I found the pref setting to turn off contextual spell
czech.

Now here's the big question. Why when I right click a WBU don't I get
a choice like "Stop doing this you stupid program!" Seriously. It
could say "Why the underline?" and when I choose that, it could say
"This is because of the contextual spelling feature yadda, yadda. Do
you want to turn it off? Yes. No."

Les

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hi Les,

If you really want an answer--they probably don't have the "stop doing
this" on the right-click because it's a new feature and they ran out of
time to put it in. It might show up eventually. Also, while they do
have that feature on AutoCorrects (at least in Mac Word), the
spelling/grammar corrections work differently and they would have had to
write a whole lot of new code that might have conflicted with something
else. The regular red/green underlines don't have what you want, do
they? You might post a Suggestion. This would be a good feature.

By the way, I suspect "I will fear..." in standard English is likely to
be an error in normal use. I would normally say "I would fear..."
except in specific cases. There's limits to the degree of language
processing that you can expect from a computer, and especially for
contextual errors, better to flag them. If the user doesn't know enough
to override the computer, then they probably shouldn't risk it.

A nice feature might be for all grammar checking to exclude text in
quotations. You could set that up yourself by using a style, but I
don't think it's worth the risk of not catching certain errors.

 

[Poliwog]

Hi!

C'mon, the subjunctive is almost completely outmoded in so-called
modern English. No one knows how to use it anymore, and so it is
falling entirely out of use.

And don't get me started on grammar checking...

I'll have to check out how correction works on the Mac, as soon as it
warms up enough for me to go out to the 'back office'. (That's where
the Mac is, and I miss it.)

Les