Robin Jackson said:
Hi
Wonder if anyone can help please.
Word does not seem to recognise my UK English
H dictionary, continuing to spell-check against an American dictionary.
Also my custom dictionary does not seem to be available to add words too
even though I have recreated it 3 times!!!!!!!!
Any help would be MUCH appreciated.
Word has some pretty unintuitive (that's polite for 'harebrained') ways
of choosing which dictionary is used to check each word.
The one that is almost certainly biting you is that each style has its
own language. The style's language setting wins whenever there is a
fight.
Other influences are your word preferences, your system preferences and
your keyboard's language (the latter not very consistent.)
The phase of the moon may also be important in some circumstances.
Now since the style definitions may come from the input document, some
J Random Document you foolishly pasted into the input document with
certain preferences selected, the template you started with, any shared
global template you may have installed and your normal template, you
can see that fixing the dictionary in use is a little bit of a
challenge.
If you have not used all the scary template stuff much, then start with
a fresh doc, and for all your common text styles, walk through format È
style... È modify È format È Language and set that to English (UK)
Note how elegantly Word places the choice for English (UK) just off the
top of the screen.
Usability? We've heard of it!
The language is supposed to be inherited from the "based on" style, but
I find that Word goes out of its way to make that useless, carefully
changing the language to be specifically whatever you just changed the
style's parent away from.
Don't forget to check the "add to template" on the way out.
When you next quit Word, and you have the preference properly set, do
say 'yes' when it offers to update your normal template.
If you don't, well, you will be much faster the next time you wrestle
all those styles to proper English.
As for your custom dictionary, I think there is some magic to set it to
"no language" in order for it to be looked at all whenever there is a
style whose language is not English (US), but I might be overly
jaundiced on that point.
I do a pretty good line in jaundiced when it comes to managing styles'
languages, and I don't do French or Russian or anything right to left
either.
Just learn to spell. ;-)
