Checking Spelling

Considering all the tools FileMaker provides for editing your records, it’ll come as no surprise that it also has a full spell checker built right in.

Spell Checking in One Pass

Before printing out your database or otherwise sharing it with the greater public, you’ll want to make sure your spelling is correct. If you’ve been typing new records at lightning speed, there are bound to be some typos. And nothing screams “amateur” louder than a City field that reads “Chciago.” All the spell-checking commands are found under the Edit → Spelling menu. Here you have three choices:

  • Choose Edit → Spelling → Check Selection to spell-check selected text only. This method comes in handy when you’ve just typed a word and it doesn’t quite look right.

  • To check the entire record, choose Edit → Spelling → Check Record.

  • Finally, you might want to check spelling on many records at once. In this case, choose Edit → Spelling → Check All. When you choose this option, you’re telling the spell checker to look at every field of every record in the current found set (choose Records → Show All first if you want to check every record in the database).

No matter how many records you’re checking, FileMaker opens the same Spelling dialog box shown in Figure 2-23.

The spell checker found a typo—“quandrey.” You can see the misspelled word in the Word box and underlined in red in the box at the bottom of the window. If FileMaker figures out the correct spelling, it selects it in the list under the Word box. And if you’re the type who calculates your gas mileage every time you fuel up, you’ll be delighted to discover that FileMaker keeps track of how many words you’ve spelled wrong so far, and tells you at the bottom of the window.

Figure 2-23. The spell checker found a typo—“quandrey.” You can see the misspelled word in the Word box and underlined in red in the box at ...

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