Spell Check and Autocorrect in Word 2004

[James]

I've just upgraded to Office 2004 and besides being shocked at how slow
it is (I'm running a 1Ghz powerbook and it's markedly slower than
Office X) I'm having a lot of problems with the spell checking and
autocorrect functions, which seem not to work anymore. I usually work
with autocorrect on and spelling set to check while I type but nothing
happens anymore, even when I deliberately type mistakes. I've tried
toggling them on and off, creating new documents and various other
tricks but nothing seems to work. Any suggestions?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

AutoCorrect and SpellCheck are language dependent.
With the cursor in a word that isn't being checked, go to
Tools | Language and see what comes up selected, or if the "do not check
spelling and grammar" box is checked.

To assign a language, select all text and use Tools | Language. Click
"default" if this happens in all new documents, and the language should get
added to the definition of the Normal style (usually the default text
style).

You can use Google Groups to search this ng for Word 2004 and slow, and will
find reams of information, a few benchmarks, some known bugs/design flaws,
and some things to try as fixes.
http://groups.google.com/groups?group=microsoft.public.mac.office.word

DM

 

[John McGhie]

Hi James:

I think Daiya has nailed it for your spelling issue: the Language must match
in the OS, Word, the Document and the paragraph. Make sure your default
language is set correctly on the new machine: that's what usually causes
this problem.

Office 2004 uses Apple Type Services for Unicode Interface (ATSUI) to draw
everything on the screen. Earlier versions of MS Office used Apple
QuickDraw.

ATSUI is a great deal more power-hungry than QuickDraw (which is why the
previous versions of Office "didn't" use ATSUI. But QuickDraw won't display
Unicode characters. Gotcha!!

If you have any money left, throw more memory into that Powerbook if you
can. 512 MB of memory will produce a substantial speed improvement over 256
MB, and a gigabyte offers sustained performance improvements with many
applications open.

Unfortunately, if you already have lotsa memory there's not a lot you can
do. Word is one of the most powerful and most complex applications on the
Mac. When it's busy it makes serious demands on the system. A laptop CPU,
Motherboard bandwidth, Graphics Processor, and hard disk speed are a bit
wimpy for serious work in Word.

I know this: this message comes to you from an iBook, so just think how slow
it is for ME!!

Cheers

I've just upgraded to Office 2004 and besides being shocked at how slow
it is (I'm running a 1Ghz powerbook and it's markedly slower than
Office X) I'm having a lot of problems with the spell checking and
autocorrect functions, which seem not to work anymore. I usually work
with autocorrect on and spelling set to check while I type but nothing
happens anymore, even when I deliberately type mistakes. I've tried
toggling them on and off, creating new documents and various other
tricks but nothing seems to work. Any suggestions?

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410