Trouble with thesaurus in Word for Mac 2004

[schwartzelizabeth]

'm having trouble using my thesaurus. It will work for some words in
my document but not others. All the words are English (US). When I
clicked on help, it said my proofing tools were not installed. I
checked in my applications folder for Office and they are in there.
Then i tried reinstalling Word and the proofing tools, but I get the
same error message. However, the thing that baffles me is that I get
this message for only some of the words I'm trying to look up. Other
words access the thesaurus just fine.
Can anyone help me with this problem?

thanks.

ES

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hi ES,

More information, please!

What error message do you get?

Put the cursor in a word that you get the error message for. Go to Tools |
Language. Does English US come up selected? Is the "do not check spelling
and grammar" box checked?

What do you do to use the thesaurus? As in, what do you click on or what
menu commands do you select to get it? Or which keyboard shortcuts?

Can you list a few sample words that produce this problem?

Exactly what version of Word and OS ?

PS. For future reference, reinstalling almost never fixes anything with
MacOffice, especially if you don't run the Remove Office tool first. But
there are many troubleshooting steps that come before Remove and Reinstall.

 

[schwartzelizabeth]

I got it fixed; I selected all the text in my document and then picked
English as my language in teh Tools menu. I shouldn't have to do this
for an individual document because English is my default language, but
there you go. What can you expect from a Microsoft product. It's
annoying to have to select the text in each of my documents, but it
does work.

thanks for the suggestions and info, though.

ES

 

[mmmmark]

I got it fixed; I selected all the text in my document and then picked
English as my language in teh Tools menu. I shouldn't have to do this
for an individual document because English is my default language, but
there you go. What can you expect from a Microsoft product. It's
annoying to have to select the text in each of my documents, but it
does work.

thanks for the suggestions and info, though.

ES

It gets that language information from your Normal.dot template. Check a
brand new document and be sure it is opening properly. Another way that
languages seem to pop up into documents is by pasting text from web pages or
even other documents. I inadvertently did this on a document and suddenly I
had French as my language. The best plan is to paste text as unformatted,
then it will adopt the formatting from around it.

-Mark

 

[Clive Huggan]

It gets that language information from your Normal.dot template. Check a
brand new document and be sure it is opening properly. Another way that
languages seem to pop up into documents is by pasting text from web pages or
even other documents. I inadvertently did this on a document and suddenly I
had French as my language. The best plan is to paste text as unformatted,
then it will adopt the formatting from around it.

-Mark

Just to expand on Mark's comment on "pasting text as unformatted",
Elizabeth: having copied the text in your web browser, you click in Word
then choose Edit menu -> Paste Special -> Unformatted Text -> OK.

You can automate this if, like me, you are copying material from all over
the place. Post back if you want the details.

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is 5-11 hours different from the US and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
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