Spell Check in Word / Outlook 2003

[TDen]

I have a problem with automatic spell-checking turning off in Outlook/Word
2003 (with users that use "check spelling as you type" (set in Word) and
users who use "automatically check spelling before sending" (set in Outlook),
together with check spelling as you type. The spellcheck options will
suddenly stop working/become unchecked. This doesn't seem to happen to users
at the same time, nor does it necessarily happen after a reboot, etc - no
discernable pattern that we can tell.

We have about 50 users (some are on Outlook/Word 2007 and some are on
Outlook/Word 2003 - all run off of an Exchange 2003 server). This problem
only affects a handful of users and all affected users are on Outlook/Word
2003, although it doesn't affect all Outlook /Word 2003 users). Word is set
as the email editor for all users.

We will turn automatic spell-check on for them and then a day or two later,
it stops working. When we go back and check under Options, it is no longer
set (and for those who use both options, both have become unchecked).

We have the latest SP installed on all users. We have checked group
policies and forced a group policy update on these machines, but that doesn't
affect the spellcheck options. We have tried deleting and reinstalling their
Outlook profiles in the hopes that it might be a corrupt profile, but nothing
has worked so far. (Upgrading these users to Office 2007 is not an option at
this time, nor is turning off Word as email editor).

As a side note, we are also having an issue with a few users' signatures
disappearing (well, they're still there, they just get turned off and are no
longer automatically being placed into new messages). This problem has
happened mostly to users with the spellcheck problem - but I have no idea if
it's related.

I am wondering if somehow a corrupted document could be responsible for this
as 5 out of the 6 users affected work closely together in the same department
and would often have reason to work in the same documents - although the 6th
user would have almost no reason to ever share a document with the other 5.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Graham Mayor]

Word 2003, more than any other version, has an irritating habit of losing
settings stored in the Word data key in the registry - typically items set
in Tools > Options. Even more irritating, the settings lost are not always
the same for different users. You could delete the data key and it should be
OK for a while, but the problem inevitably returns. The only sure-fire cure
is to configure the user's normal.dot template to add autorunning macros to
fix the errant settings for each document. - see
http://www.gmayor.com/installing_macro.htm

In this instance you can choose any or all of the following options and set
them true or false as required and save them in both an autonew and an
autoopen macro

With Options
.CheckSpellingAsYouType = True
.CheckGrammarAsYouType = False
.SuggestSpellingCorrections = True
.SuggestFromMainDictionaryOnly = False
.CheckGrammarWithSpelling = True
.ShowReadabilityStatistics = False
.IgnoreUppercase = True
.IgnoreMixedDigits = True
.IgnoreInternetAndFileAddresses = True
.AllowCombinedAuxiliaryForms = True
.EnableMisusedWordsDictionary = True
.AllowCompoundNounProcessing = True
.UseGermanSpellingReform = True
End With


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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[TDen]

Thanks very much for the response - this is certainly the first time anyone
has offered a "sure-fire" solution. I have a question - since we use Word as
email editor, does Outlook use normal.dot when composing new emails? what
about when replying to an email? (My users probably depend on the "check
spelling as you type" feature in Outlook even more so than Word).

Also, we use a few templates here, not many, but I believe they're all
built off of normal.dot - will storing the macros in normal.dot have any
affect in documents created from other templates?

I'm going to give your idea a try, although I have to admit I've never
written a macro and might need some guidance.

Thanks,
Trish