Topic: Spelling and Grammar Checking

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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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Check Spelling in Your Document Need to double-check your spelling? Word has a powerful spell-checker that will help out. Microsoft Word versions: 6 | 95

Checking for Commonly Confused Words Word will check your document for Commonly Confused words to ensure the proper verbiage is used. Microsoft Word versions: 6 | 95 | 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Checking for Gender-Specific Grammar Want to make your writing gender neutral? Word can help. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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.” Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Context Menus, Spell Checking, and Common Tasks Automatic Spell Checking can change your menu options. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

Grammar Checking Your Document Not quite sure if your grammar is up to snuff? Word can check it for you. Microsoft Word versions: 6 | 95

Hiding Errors Word normally displays your spelling and grammar errors as you type. Here's how to turn that feature off. Microsoft Word versions: 6 | 95 | 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Hiding Grammar Errors Word normally shows your grammar errors on-screen, as you type. Don't want them flagged? Here's how to turn off the feature. Microsoft Word versions: 95 | 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Hiding Spelling Errors Word normally shows your spelling errors on-screen, as you type. Don't want them flagged? Here's how to turn off the feature. Microsoft Word versions: 95 | 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

Rechecking Spelling and Grammar How to force Word to recheck text that was previously checked. Microsoft Word versions: 95 | 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

Spell Check Won't Work What do you do if Word doesn't detect spelling errors it should? Microsoft Word versions: 6 | 95 | 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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! Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

Spell Checking Uppercase Words If desired, Word's spell checker can also check words that use all uppercase letters. Microsoft Word versions: 6 | 95 | 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 2000 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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. Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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