Hello all,

The grammar rules used by Word seem to be wrong for the language I am using (Canadian French). They used to be fine in older versions of Word, but that is not the case with Word 2016. The biggest problem is with the spacing rules before and after punctuation. Word 2016 seems to use "French - France" rules for spacing, even though I have "French - Canada" selected. For instance, Canadian French doesn't require a space before interrogation or exclamation marks (? !), while France does. In older versions, Word would never underline a statement such as "Question? Answer!", but now it underlines with green and suggests "question ? answer !".

I know I can change grammar options in the proofing settings. But all I can do is uncheck the "spacing and punctuation" setting for grammar check. If I uncheck this setting, it won't check for extra spacing, or spacing in front of columns, etc.

My question: is there a way to customize these settings? I don't mean uncheck the box and stop Word from checking spacing. I mean customize the spacing rules in the grammar dictionary for Canadian French. I don't get why Word doesn't follow the OQLF official guidelines for Canadian French...

I have a dedicated language-proofing software (Antidote) that is much more performant than Word, but I still like green underlining for easy, evident mistakes. I'd just like for Word to understand the basic rules of the selected language: there is NO spacing before a !/?/; in Canadian French, just like English. What's the point of offering many varieties of French dictionaries if only France rules are applied? The spelling is the same (contrary to British/American)! But grammar rules aren't!

Thanks.