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Question in MSWord using English (UK) Spell Check?
Subject:Question in MSWord using English (UK) Spell Check? From:Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 02 Jun 2005 20:35:11 -0400
Shannon Pierotti reports: <<We are preparing a manuscript for release
in the UK, and I am not sure what step I am missing in order to spell
check my MS Word document to check for English (UK). I checked to
ensure that the English (UK) dictionary is enabled, I formatted the
entire document in Language: English (UK), and then ran the spell check
English (UK). The spell check did not pick up some obvious words that
would be misspelled in the UK, such as recognize and aging. Any ideas
of where I'm going wrong?>>
First thing to do is select one of the problem words, open the Tools
menu, then select Language. If the software shows that English (UK) is
selected, then the word (and probably the surrounding paragraph) is set
to use the correct dictionary.
Word has an unfortunate time-saving 'feature' (I call it a design flaw
or outright bug) that lets it save time by not spellchecking text it
thinks that it's already checked. It's not clear to me why or when it
comes to think it's already checked text. In any event, open the
Options (or Preferences on a Mac) dialog, select the Spelling and
Grammar tab. If you see a button labeled "Recheck document" at the
bottom left instead of the usual "Check document", Word is trying and
failing to be helpful. Click the button, and most times (not always)
Word will now redo the spellcheck from the start of the document.
You didn't specify how you "formatted the document in English (UK)",
but if you used the tempting but misleadingly named "default language"
feature (Tools-->Language, then select a language and click the
"Default..." button), that won't do it. Another major design flaw, for
reasons too lengthy to go into here. All that feature does is set your
Normal template to use the selected language next time you create a
document based on that template. No real effect on the current
document.
If you did this the "right" way and changed the language definition in
all the paragraph and character styles used in the document, you're
still not out of the (U.S. English) woods yet. <g> There are two likely
problems. First, if the language originally defined for text with a
given format was not English (UK), then Word won't automatically change
the language just because you changed the language definition in the
style.
This is yet another "feature": if (like most of us) you manually
override a style definition to boldface or italicize a word, the
software protects your work by not overriding that format--for example,
by not applying the new style definition, overriding the format, and
losing all those manual changes. I'm not sure exactly what
circumstances cause Word to make the change and which ones don't; the
behavior seems to follow some pattern that eludes me--though I confess
I've never spent the time to figure out what it is.
Second, the styles may be set to automatically update from the template
used to define the document. So here's what happens: you change the
style definitions, go your merry way, and save and close the document.
You then come back and finish editing the document, only to discover
that when you reopened it, Word blithely restored all the style
properties defined in the template. Yes, this is also a feature. <g>
You can manually trick the spellchecker into using the right dictionary
by doing a "select all" (Control or Command plus A), then opening
Tools, selecting Language, then selecting English (UK). This isn't the
best way to work, because if you reapply any styles that aren't using
that dictionary, they'll override your choice of English (UK). But as a
trick for forcing the spellchecker to work, it's an acceptable kludge.
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