Hello Word Forum!

Well, for some reason my spell checker has stopped working - I generally use it if I'm uncertain of a word's spelling by selecting the word and selecting "spelling and grammar" from the tools menu or by pressing F7 and it has always worked... until recently...

Just lately I've been suspicious so I've deliberately misspelled a word and then checked it, and the spell checker tells me it's fine, or just doesn't recognize the error.

BTW I have the automatic spell checker switched off because the red underline thing gets annoying, I tend to prefer to just check words myself if I'm uncertain of spelling. In any case, any advise or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks

Kenny

See http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/MasterSpellCheck.htm.

For what it's worth, earlier I preferred to turn off the automatic spellchecking, just like you. But it's actually easier to keep it on and let it flag potentially misspelled words. It reduces the risk that I miss an error and send a document to others with a spelling error in it. If it flags a few words that aren't really misspelled, that isn't a big problem. If many words are flagged, such as names, you can tell Word not to spellcheck those.

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

yeah I get what you're saying, but what I don't understand is why if I deliberately write a word like mennbttj then press F7 the spell checker does not pick it up. If I turn on the automatic spell check feature it picks up misspellings with the red underline but when I try to use it manually while the autocheck feature is off it doesn't work. Any thoughts?

That is strange. Does Word display a message (any message) after manual spellcheck has completed?

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

what is stranger still is when I've gone to duplicate the problem in order to answer your question all of a sudden it seems to be working normally.... working fine... so it's apparently an intermittent problem, either that or this is an episode of Twilight Zone...

Does the problem, when it occurs, appear to be document-specific or generic?

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

seems pretty random - haven't been able to isolate any specific document, it just works one minute then doesn't the next...