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David Downing reports: <<I just ran into a problem where Word's spell
checker missed some typos in a paragraph -- and made it look like I hadn't
spell checked the document before I sent it out for review. I've gone back
over the paragraph several times, and the typos are still being ignored.>>
One thing to try: Open the Tools menu, select Options, and select the
Spelling tab. There's a button at the bottom of the tab that may currently
be labeled "Recheck document" that represents one of the dimmer design
decisions from Word's designers. Not the most obvious place to hide this
setting, and if you didn't pay close attention to your options, you'd never
know that this <ahem> feature exists.
The underlying notion is that to be helpful and save time, Word would ignore
sections of a document that had already been spellchecked. Unfortunately,
Word sometimes gets confused about what it has and hasn't checked, and that
can lead to the kind of behavior you're reporting. Clicking the "Recheck
document" button may solve your problem. If not:
<<The paragraph is NOT marked "Do not check spelling" (but see below). The
two typos did NOT accidentally get entered into the custom dictionary. The
typos -- "pr" and "s" both by themselves -- don't look like they're things
Word would routinely ignore by default. So far as I can remember, I DID NOT
instruct Word to ignore these during the session I was in. One thing that
might be relevant, however, is that I trued selecting the whole document,
then calling up the language box, and the "Do not check" spelling box was
checked. But I unchecked it, the Word still ignored the typos.>>
I think your last note contains the problem: Word helpfully assumes that if
you've overridden the paragraph-level style and applied manual formatting to
anything inside the paragraph (including selecting the language of a word),
you must have had a good reason. Thus, Word protects that formatting even if
you try to override it. Very frustrating if you don't know what's going on
and what to do about it.
To solve the problem, select the offending text or even the entire paragraph
(***not the whole document***) and press Control-Spacebar; this is Word's
shortcut for "remove formatting and reapply the underlying paragraph's style
definitions" (including the language defined for the style). The reason I
suggested not applying this to the whole document? Because doing so will
remove all other formatting, including boldface and italics and spacing and
etc., that you applied manually rather than using a character style. Heck,
it'll even remove a character style. Reapplying all this formatting to the
entire document can be a nightmare.
If you want to find all the text that's set to be skipped by the spellcheck
so you can remove this setting (by pressing Control-Spacebar): Open the Edit
menu and select Find, then click the "More" button. Next, click the Format
button and select Language. In the dialog box that appears, you'll see two
choices at the top: "no language" and "no proofing". Pick the second one. (I
don't think you can select the first one--at least, I couldn't.) Search
through the document and one by one, remove all the "no proofing"
formatting.
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
(try ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca if you get no response)
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"It's one thing to see death coming at the hands of your own creation.
That's part of the human epic tradition, after all. Oedipus and his father.
Baron Frankenstein and his monster. William Henry Gates and Windows
'09."--David Brin, _Kiln People_
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