Hi John:
I am surprised that you find this an "obscure feature" after eight years of
using Word: it's right at the core of the Spelling function
The language of your text, the language of your document, the language of
your styles and the language of your operating system must all match for a
long and happy spell-checking.
Start by recognising that there are 29 flavours of English. If your
dictionary is set to English US and the text arrives in English UK,
spell-checking is disabled! The language names must match exactly,
character-for-character.
Ensure that you have each language you want to spell-check in installed in
your operating system. Word reads its default language on Startup according
to the keyboard setting of your OS. If that's wrong, spell-checking will
behave most peculiarly.
Then ensure that you installed the Proofing Tools for all of the languages
you are likely to encounter: English US, English UK, English Canadian and
English Australian are my favourites
Now: Ensure that your Custom Dictionary is set to "No Language" or "All
Languages" depending on your version of Word. If the custom dictionary is
set to "English US" and you are spell-checking English UK text, Word is left
with no place to add words. Set it to No Language so your custom Dictionary
is available to any text. (You can have multiple custom dictionaries set to
multiple languages, but don't unless you are in a large editorial
department: it's too much trouble).
Now: Select All in your document and use Tools>Language>Set Language to set
to your preferred language and click the Default button. This sets your
Normal Template to run in the correct language. This affects only new
documents: each document inherits its base language setting from Normal when
you create it.
Now you need to check all of your styles to see if any of them have a
language set. By default, ALL styles inherit their language setting from
Normal style, so check Normal first. If you have customised the Based On
property of your styles, you then need to set their languages independently.
And you need to be aware of which style you are using for each piece of
text. Chances are, your text has a style applied such as a Heading Style
which has been set with a language of "No Proofing". The dialog you are
seeing indicates that there is some No Proofing language somewhere in the
document. No Proofing is a "language" that disables the proofing tools
(both spelling and grammar). It's used for things such as computer code and
tables of contents, where you do not want the spell-checker operating.
An easy way to get your Normal Template correct is to delete it with Word
Quit. Word will create a new default one when it next starts up. Just be
careful: the default it creates will be set to the language the OS is set to
when Word starts.
Hope this helps
from "John said:
NO SPELL OR GRAMMAR CHECK
I have a question for you folks.
I use Office X 10.1.4, specifically, Word and Entourage.
Just recently I noticed that Word DOES NOT check spelling.
Entourage still checks the spelling just fine.
I've spent about two hours troubleshooting, checking file paths,
knowledge bases, newsgroups etc.
To test, I intentionally misspell a word and a window prompt pops up
immediately after I click spell check:
³The Spelling and Grammar check is complete, Text set to
(no proofing) was skipped, To find (no proofing) text,
click Edit/Replace, click More, click Format, click
language and choose (no proofing).²
I checked this out. After 8 years of using Word I never
had the need to drill down into this obscure feature.
I went ahead and clicked on ³English US².
Do you have any suggestions?
John
Los Angeles, CA
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John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
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