Okay Word gurus, this is a weird one.
I have a Word document in which I am making edits. I did not create this file.
Spell checking works in the document normally.
Except in one paragraph.
In that (bulleted) paragraph, the word “relatiely” (supposed to be relatively) is NOT underlined in red as a spelling error. As an experiment, I can type made-up words (“bunkemty” was my test sample) – in the para in question, they appear without being underlined (they are not flagged as errors)…in other paragraphs, those same made-up words do get flagged, as they should.
It gets weirder.
SOME words in the paragraph ARE flagged…if I turn off “ignore words in UPPERCASE” in the word options, some of the acronyms in the para DO get flagged – but others do NOT. None of the acronyms in question, flagged or unflagged, is a real word, and none appear in the custom dictionary, so ALL of them should be underlined when I change that setting.
Getting the obvious out of the way:
Spell-checking is turned on for the document, Language is NOT set to “no proofing” (it is in fact set to US English with spell-checking enabled), the words are NOT in the user-created custom dictionary of acceptable words (I read the entire file), the words are NOT ignored (I used the Word button \word options\proofing\recheck document button to re-set words ignored by users).
I can use the format painter to apply all paragraph settings from a “good” paragraph to my suspect para but the errors persist.
The para can be pasted into a new document but the errors persist. The errors persist through a complete overnight shutdown and restart.
Now, obviously I can retype that paragraph word-for-word in a new blank document and insert it into my doc. But that doesn’t identify what’s going on, and until I do, who knows what other typos/misspellings are being missed. You see, because it’s omitting the red underlining, it’s impossible to see-at-a-glance other words that are misspelled, without painstakingly going through each word one-at-a-time. A random or unreliable spell checker that lets a few typos through is essentially no spell checker, since you’d have to check it yourself (the old-fashioned way) to be sure.
I don’t want to slow down that much, and I dont’ want to be passing forward serious typos and spelling errors, so I’d like to understand what’s going on here.
Any ideas?
As the police detective said in The Terminator, “I hate the weird ones.”