Persistent 'Do not check spelling or grammar'

[Mark Tangard]

What is the secret to turning this feature OFF throughout a whole document?
(Or, better for our purposes, turning it off permanently?) Increasingly now we
see specific files suddenly ignore the spell-checker. The skipped words haven't
been accidentally added to the custom dictionary, and every attempt to disable
the NoProofing feature, whether manually or resetting all the styles via VBA
(which is not as straightforward as ya'd think), fails; the box in Tools>
Language> Set Language always shows up "half-X'd" when you select the whole doc
and look at it.

What's the purpose of that feature anyway? (I've only ever used it to skip
biological terms in docs that overflow with them.) And why does it suddenly &
unexplainably seem to add itself to parts of a document? Does it have to do
with where said parts might've been pasted from? (Haven't seen evidence for
that, just grasping at straws.)

Word 2003 SP2, Win XP.

TIA
Mark

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Language settings can ride in on a pasted clip as small as a single
character and infect the rest of the doc (if you start typing at that
point). There are certainly uses for this formatting. For example, if you're
using the Plain Text style to type programming code, you might want to add
the "no proofing" property to it. Ultimately, you just have to keep using
Ctrl+A, Tools | Language | Set Language | clear the check box.

 

[Mark Tangard]

But that's just the issue. Doing those exact steps *doesn't* disable the
Do-not-check feature. If we click Tools->Lang->SetLang right away after
supposedly enabling Do-not-check for the whole file (i.e., without adding even a
single character to the document), the Do-not-check box is *still* gray-checked,
and misspelled words continue to elude the checker.

This can't be by design.

MT

Language settings can ride in on a pasted clip as small as a single
character and infect the rest of the doc (if you start typing at that
point). There are certainly uses for this formatting. For example, if you're
using the Plain Text style to type programming code, you might want to add
the "no proofing" property to it. Ultimately, you just have to keep using
Ctrl+A, Tools | Language | Set Language | clear the check box.

-- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

What you're saying is inconsistent: Why are you *enabling* "Do not check"
and then expecting the spelling checker to work? Also, note that Ctrl+A
selects only the document body (and perhaps included text boxes); it doesn't
necessarily include the header/footer, footnotes, etc.

 

[Mark Tangard]

Oh, sorry, the double negative fried me a bit. I meant *disabling* DontCheck.

This is more than just failing to proof odd stuff like text boxes. It skips
ordinary material in the text layer that has misspelled words in it. Doesn't
matter if we select the whole document or a single paragraph with bloopers in
it; the checker doesn't see them.

What you're saying is inconsistent: Why are you *enabling* "Do not check"
and then expecting the spelling checker to work? Also, note that Ctrl+A
selects only the document body (and perhaps included text boxes); it doesn't
necessarily include the header/footer, footnotes, etc.

-- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama