Spelling and Grammar Checking

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Spelling and Grammar Checking' topic. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

Adjusting Spell Check for Internet Addresses
When writing technical documents, URLs are a common thing to include in your text. Normally Word will mark these as incorrectly spelled. You can, however, configure Word so that it ignores them.

Allowing for Words that Contain Numbers
If your writing often contains words that include numbers, you'll want to make sure you set up the spelling checker to ignore them. Here's how to do it.

Allowing Passive Voice in Writing
When you have Word do grammar checking on your document, it typically marks everything it considers wrong with the way you write. This includes marking sentences that appear to use "passive" voice. You can, however, turn off this grammar rule so that Word ignores whether you use passive voice or not.

Changing Between English Variants
What is the easiest way to switch between English spelling variants in a document? This tip examines a couple of ways you can handle the desired conversion.

Check Spelling in Your Document
Need to double-check your spelling? Word has a powerful spell-checker that will help out.

Checking for Commonly Confused Words
Word will check your document for Commonly Confused words to ensure the proper verbiage is used.

Checking for Gender-Specific Grammar
Want to make your writing gender neutral? Word can help.

Checking for Incorrect Numbers in Text
One of the grammar rules you can check for in a document is the incorrect use of numbers. If you are unsure when to use digits and when to spell numbers out, this tip shows you how to make Word double-check your prose.

Checking for Sentences Beginning with Conjunctions
You can use the grammar-checking capabilities of Word to analyze your document according to many different grammatical rules. This tip explains how you can force Word to flag sentences that begin with common conjunctions such as "and," "but," and "hopefully."

Checking Up On Numbers
The rules used by Word's grammar checker can easily be modified. This tip explains how to enable the rule that checks for whether numbers should be written using digits or words.

Context Menus, Spell Checking, and Common Tasks
Automatic Spell Checking can change your menu options.

Correctly Repeated Words
The spell checker in Word normally marks as incorrect a repeated word. In some instances repeated words may actually be correct. This tip explains how to stop Word from marking these correctly repeated words as incorrect.

DLL Problem with Spell Check
Word 2002 has an issue with the SpellCheck feature returning a dll error.

Editing While Spell-Checking
It is not uncommon, as you are spell-checking a document, to notice other things that need editing in a document. Word allows you to make those pesky changes without closing the spell-checker.

Fast Spelling Corrections
Want to correct the spelling of a word that Word thinks is improperly spelled? A quick way to do it is to right-click the misspelled word, as explained in this tip.

Grammar Checking Your Document
Not quite sure if your grammar is up to snuff? Word can check it for you.

Hiding Errors
If you find the green and red squiggly underlines that Word adds to your document distracting, you might want a quick way to hide them. Here's the absolute fastest way to get them out of your sight.

Hiding Grammar Errors
Are you bothered by the green underlines that Word uses to mark potential grammar errors in your document? You can hide those potential errors by following the steps in this tip.

Hiding Spelling Errors
When you are typing in a document, Word normally checks your spelling in the background, marking possible spelling errors as you go. If the markings bother you, here's how you can turn them off.

Ignoring the Spelling of Proper Nouns
The spell-check feature of Word is quite handy, but you may (at some time) decide that you don't want it to check certain words. This tip describes a scenario where a user doesn't want it to check proper nouns. Several potential solutions are described.

Limiting a Spelling Check
When you perform a spelling check, Word typically checks everything in your document. If you want to limit what is checked, the key is to understand how Word determines what should be checked and what shouldn't. This tip examines how you can place limits on what is being checked.

Limiting Spell Checking
Spell check a document, and Word normally checks several different dictionaries. Here's how to limit the dictionary consulted by Word when doing the check.

Making Ignore All Work for a Document on All Systems
When you tell Word's spell checker to ignore all instances of a misspelling, you may expect that the misspelling will be ignored on other systems that may open the document. This isn't how Word works, however. This tip explains what you can do to get the results you want.

Making Spell Check Ignore Characters
The rules of professional editing often require that editorial changes in a quote be noted with brackets. These brackets, while essential, cause problems with Word's spelling checker. This tip discusses some options to remove those problems.

Only Showing Readability Statistics
Perform a grammar check, and Word displays some statistics that represent an analysis of your words. By writing a macro you can access these statistics and display whatever part of them you want.

Pulling Out Spelling Errors
Do you want all of your spelling errors in one place? Here's a quick macro that will extract them and put them into their own document.

Quickly Accessing Spelling and Grammar Options
Do you need to change the options by which Word checks your spelling and grammar? Here's a quick way to display the necessary dialog box without the need to traverse the menus.

Rechecking Spelling and Grammar
If you ever need to check the spelling or grammar of a document from scratch, it can be confusing knowing the proper steps to follow. Here's how you can instruct Word to start checking all over, with a clean slate.

Separating Grammar-Checking from Spell-Checking
You may not want Word to perform a grammar check every time it does a spell check. If this is the case, you can make one quick configuration change and the two tasks will be unlinked so they don't happen at the same time.

Setting Grammar-Checking Options
The grammar-checker in Word is configurable, which means that you can set it up to check (or not check) various elements of your document's structure. Of course, Word also makes it rather "non-intuitive" to figure out where to make these configuration changes. This tip explains how to find the grammar-checker settings and then make the changes you desire.

Setting Spell-Checking Options
As Word is spell-checking your document, it follows set "rules" on what is checked and how the checking is done. This tip explains how you can change the parameters by which Word performs this common task.

Spell Check Misses Misspelled Words
If you do a spelling check and notice that Word doesn't catch a word that you know is misspelled, it is easy to get frustrated. The reasons for the mss could be many, as explored in this tip.

Spell Check Won't Work
What do you do if Word doesn't detect spelling errors it should?

Spell Checking Forms
Word includes some specialized tools that allow you to create forms that can be later filled in by users of your document. Unfortunately, spell-checking what people put in the form controls can be problematic. This tip describes the problem, along with some workarounds you can use.

Spell Checking From the Keyboard
If you hate to take your hands from the keyboard, even to right-click on a word, you'll love the information in this tip. You'll discover that you need the mouse even less than you thought!

Spell Checking Uppercase Words
If desired, Word's spell checker can also check words that use all uppercase letters.

Spell Checking when Closing Documents
When you close a document, you might want to do one final check of the spelling, just to make sure that you didn't miss anything. Using one of Word's automatic macros (AutoClose) you can make sure that the final spelling check is done.

Spell Checking with Text Boxes
How Word spell-checks the text within a text box can be a bit confusing. The text boxes are actually spell-checked after your regular text. This tip explains what that is, and also discusses some ways you can modify your layout to have text spell-checked differently.

Spell Checking Your Document
Word allows you to easily and quickly check the spelling of your document. You can either check the spelling for the whole document, or the spelling for a limited portion of the document. This tip explains how you can perform both tasks.

Spell-Check Won't Work
Having problems making spell check work on a portion of your document? There are two primary causes for such an occurrence, and both causes are discussed in this tip.

Spell-Check Won't Work in Word 2000 with a Word 2003 Document
Barry is running into a problem spell-checking a Word 2003 document on a Word 2000 system. Word should handle the task easily, on both systems. This tip provides a few ideas you can use to track down whether the problem is ultimately with the document itself or with the Word 2000 system.

Spell-Checking Abbreviations
Abbreviations are very, very common in most documents. What are you to do if your spell-checker doesn't recognize your abbreviations, even the common ones? This tip examines some of the causes of this problem and what you can do to make the spell-checker recognize what it should.

Spell-checking Uppercase Words
When Word checks the spelling of a document, it can either check or ignore words that are in uppercase letters. Here's how to throw the switch that controls this option.

Spelling Errors on Internet Addresses
Tired of Word marking Internet addresses as spelling errors? You can turn off this check by applying the steps in this tip.

Spelling Errors Resulting from Erroneous Spaces
Spelling errors can result from improperly ordering letters in a word, or from adding spaces where they shouldn't be. This tip examines how you can correct spelling errors when you add those extra spaces in the middle of words.

Turning Off Proofing for Superscripts
When you add superscripts to words in your document, you may not want those superscripts to be spell-checked. Here's how to disable the checking of your superscripts.

Turning Off Spell Checking
For some documents, you may not want spell checking turned on. There are two ways that you can turn it off, depending on whether you want to affect the entire document or only a portion of one. This tip covers both methods.

Word Flags Words Connected with Non-Breaking Hyphens
It is not uncommon to add hyphens between words to help clarify the meaning of your prose. You might even add non-breaking hyphens so that the two connected words stay on the same line. But if doing so means that Word flags your connected words as somehow in error, then you might rightly question what is going on. This tip examines the problem and discusses a couple of ways you can try to get around it.

 

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