Spell Checking Issues

[Scott Meyers]

I have 3 questions about the spell checker in PPT 2002 (Office XP):

1. My presentations consist of a mix of text in English and code in
programming languages. When I do a spell check, I don't want the code
to be checked, because most "words" there aren't English words (e.g.,
"std::tr1::weak_ptr<Widget>"). All the code is at bullet level 2. Is
there some way to tell PPT not to check any text at this bullet level?
If not, is there some other way to deal with this issue? Note that
many slides have both text and code, so simply skipping slides with
code isn't an effective approach.

2. Code requires straight quotation marks, but text should use curly
quotes. I can use autocorrect to change straight quotes to curly as I
type, and I can disable this when I'm typing code, but sometimes I
forget to reenable it when switching from code to text, and I end up
with straight quotes in my text. I'd like the spell checker to tell me
about straight quotes and offer to make them curly, but I can't find a
way to get it to do this. Is it possible?

3. Is it possible to have PPT automatically set up per-presentation custom
dictionaries? Each presentation has a set of special words used in
code examples that are also used in English text, so I'd like to have a
way to add these words to a per-presentation dictionary. I don't want
to add them to my general custom dictionary, because a legitmate "word"
in one talk (e.g. "pImpl") might well be a spelling error in another
talk. I also don't want to set up per-presentation custom dictionaries
manually, because I have dozens of presentations I'd have to do this
for.

FWIW, my motivation for all the above is that these features are present in
FrameMaker, the program I've been using up to this point for slide
development.

All help appreciated,

Scott

 

[Geetesh Bajaj]

You can set PowerPoint to not spell-check words with numbers - but if your
code has no numbers, then that won't work for you.

Having said that, some clever VBA programming may help - but you won't find
the type of control that you can get in FrameMaker, or even LaTeX.

 

[Bill Dilworth]

If there are blocks of text (your code) you do not want to be spellchecked,
you can insert them within a Word object.

1) Copy the code over to a Word document
2) Select the text in Word
3) Paste special into PowerPoint as a Word object

PowerPoint will ignore this text when spell checking. The quotes keep their
formatting from Word, so curved vs. straight should be less of an issue.


--
Bill Dilworth
A proud member of the Microsoft PPT MVP Team
Users helping fellow users.
http://billdilworth.mvps.org
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vestprog2@ Please read the PowerPoint FAQ pages.
yahoo. They answer most of our questions.
com www.pptfaq.com
..

 

[Scott Meyers]

For the record, I also received this suggestion via email:

I couldn't find any way to customize spell checker to disallow certain
attributes or levels. However, one way to work around it is to select the
text, click Tools --> Language --> No Proofing. Granted, you'll need to do
this on every slide.

Scott