Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

chapter 2: editing in word 83

Spelling and Grammar

Whatever your document—term paper, résumé, or letter to the milkman—typos

can hinder its effectiveness and sully your credibility. When you let mistakes remain

in your document, your reader may doubt that you put any time or care into it at all.

Word helps you achieve the perfect result by pointing out possible errors, leaving

the final call up to you.

Tip: A spelling-related feature (new since Word 2001) may have been benefiting you without you even

noticing. When you incur a typo that even a Sominex-drugged reader would notice, such as wodnerful or

thier, Word makes the correction automatically, instantly, and quietly. (Press c-Z or F1 immediately after-

ward if you actually intended the misspelled version.) Technically, Word is using its spelling dictionaries as

fodder for its AutoCorrect feature, as described on page 98.

As a bonus, the spelling checker in Word X is smart enough to recognize run-together words (such as

intothe and giveme) and propose the split-apart versions as corrected spellings.

There are two basic modes to Word’s spelling and grammar features:

Check Spelling as You Type

Word’s factory setting is to check spelling and grammar continuously, immediately

flagging any error it detects as soon as you finish typing it. Each spelling error gets a

red, squiggly underline; each grammatical error gets a green one. These squiggly

underlines (which also show up in the other Office programs) are among the most

noticeable hallmarks of Office documents, as shown in Figure 2-7.

If you can spot the problem right away—an obvious spelling error, for example—

simply edit it. The squiggly underline disappears as soon as your insertion point

leaves the vicinity. It’s often more fun, however, to Control-click each error (see

Figure 2-7), which opens a contextual menu to help you handle the correction pro-

cess. Here are the commands you’ll find in this contextual menu:

• Help opens the Word Help system, as described in Appendix B.

• The next segment of the contextual menu contains spelling suggestions from

Word’s dictionary. It says “(no spelling suggestions)” if Word has none.

If one of these suggestions is the word you were trying to spell, click it. Word

instantly replaces the error in your document, thus evaporating the squiggly line.

• Choosing Ignore All from the contextual menu tells Word to butt out—that this

word is spelled exactly the way you want it. Once you’ve chosen this command,

the underlines disappear from all occurrences of that term in this document. (If

you use the same spelling in a new document, however, Word will flag it as an

error again. To teach Word the word forever, add it to the custom dictionary, as

described next.)

Spelling and

Grammar

84 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

• As you’ve probably figured out by now, Word underlines a word not necessarily

because it’s spelled incorrectly, but because it’s not on Word’s list of correctly

spelled words. Occasionally, you have to “teach” Word a new word. The Add com-

mand does exactly that.

Word maintains word lists called custom dictionaries. When Word checks a word’s

spelling as you type it, the Add command on the contextual menu instantly adds

that word to the current custom dictionary. You can also edit a custom dictio-

nary directly, as described on page 91.

Note: Adding words to the custom dictionary may trigger an error message saying, “custom dictionary is

full.” If you get this alert, install the Office X Service Release 1 (page 12), which fixes this bug.

Figure 2-7:

Top: When Word is set to check

spelling and grammar as you type,

errors are underlined as you go.

Middle: Control-clicking each error

opens a contextual menu that

contains suggested spellings and

commonly used Spelling and

Grammar commands.

Bottom: Choosing “About this

sentence” prompts the Office

Assistant to explain the grammati-

cal issue (bottom). Press Option-F7

to move on to the next error.

Spelling and

Grammar