Ensuring that Spell Checking is Enabled in All Styles

Michala's office uses a template to produce several reports each year. They have a problem with spell check not always working, because at some point in the past the checkbox for "Do not check spelling and grammar" was turned on in one or more of the styles. Michala has repeatedly combed through the styles trying to find the ones with this checkbox turned on, and each time she thought that she found them all. However, occasionally a user comes to her and says they are having the spell check problem again, and she has to go through the process once more. Michala wonders if there is any way she can globally change this setting in every style in her template at once or, perhaps, another way to make sure that it is turned off, forever, once and for all.

Before explaining different ways you can approach this problem, it is helpful to understand what may be happening with these documents. If your new reports are based on an existing document, then it is possible that the problem is not with the template but with the existing document.

For instance, if you need to do a report for this quarter you have two options—you can either create the new report from a template or you can load up a previous quarter's report and make changes in it for this quarter. If you choose the latter route, the unwanted style settings could be inherited from that document and have nothing at all to do with the template. You can search and make changes in this quarter's report, but if your coworkers base next quarter's report, three months from now, on the same existing report that they used as the basis for this quarter's report, you will have the same problem then that you do now.

If you are sure that the problem is with the template (you know that your coworkers are creating this quarter's report from the template), then you'll want to load the template directly and make the changes therein. Save the template out under a new name, and then use this updated template for future reports. You could also, if desired, load any existing reports and reattach the updated template. (If you do this, make sure that you choose the Automatically Update Document Styles checkbox in the Templates and Add-Ins dialog box.)

Finally, if you simply want to fix each report as it is brought to you by your coworkers, you can use a macro to step through each style in the document and modify the spell check setting.

Sub FixStyles()
    For Each objStyle in ActiveDocument.Styles
        objStyle.NoProofing = False
    Next objStyle
End Sub

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (8134) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Ensuring that Spell Checking is Enabled in All Styles.