Word cannot see Custom dictionary?

[Ignat Solzhenitsyn]

Strange: Entourage sees my custom dictionary, and spell-checks accordingly.
Word, meanwhile, also sees the same dictionary (although the full path is
annoyingly incomplete), yet now refuses to recognize those words that I have
entered there. I threw away all Word and Office prefs and settings files
(at least all the ones I could think of), but this has not helped. Any
thoughts on how I can get Word to behave would be greatly appreciated!

 

[John McGhie]

I suspect that you may have set a "Language" on the custom dictionary.

If you are going to have only ONE custom dictionary, you should set it to
"No Language" as described in the Help.

Read " I added words to a custom dictionary, but the spelling checker still
questions them." in the Help. Make sure you clear the "Suggest from Main
Dictionary Only" checkbox.

Now go to Word>Preferences>Spelling and Grammar>Dictionaries. Select the
Custom Dictionary and set it to "(no language)".

Text in a Word document is language-specific. If the text in the document
is marked with a language, Word uses only the custom dictionary marked to
match that specific language. "No Language" matches all languages.

This causes big problems in English. There are 29 variants of the "English"
language. Unless you have 29 custom dictionaries, one for each of the
flavours, you need to ensure your custom dictionary is set to No Language.

Hope this helps

Strange: Entourage sees my custom dictionary, and spell-checks accordingly.
Word, meanwhile, also sees the same dictionary (although the full path is
annoyingly incomplete), yet now refuses to recognize those words that I have
entered there. I threw away all Word and Office prefs and settings files (at
least all the ones I could think of), but this has not helped. Any thoughts
on how I can get Word to behave would be greatly appreciated!

--

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

 

[Ignat Solzhenitsyn]

Fabulous. You absolutely solved my problem. I did indeed have one of the
English variants set as my language for that custom dictionary. Changing it
to ³none² took care of it immediately. Thank you so much for taking the
time to help.


on 11/30/2004 19.02, in article BDD35530.D740%[email protected], John McGhie

 

[John McGhie]

Hi Ignat:

Good to hear I got one right

Just be aware that there's a bit of a catch-22 in Custom Dictionaries.

Word will use multiple Custom Dictionaries. It looks down the list in order
until it finds one that matches the language in use (which can vary
word-by-word in a document).

The other applications can see only the custom dictionary you select. The
one to select in the other applications is the one you have set to "No
Language".

The problem is that WORD will use the first dictionary that matches the
text. So if you wish to have multiple custom dictionaries active in Word,
you need to ensure that the one set to "No Language" is the last one in the
list.

Trust me, this is better than the PC implementation, where you cannot select
a dictionary in the other applications and things become very complicated


Cheers

Fabulous. You absolutely solved my problem. I did indeed have one of the
English variants set as my language for that custom dictionary. Changing it
to ³none² took care of it immediately. Thank you so much for taking the time
to help.


on 11/30/2004 19.02, in article BDD35530.D740%[email protected], John McGhie

--

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