MS WORD 2007 Spell-checker issue -- intermittent in one paragraph

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.”

Copy the paragraph into a new document and save it as plain text (filename.txt).

Close all documents.

Open the plain text document and save it as a Word document (filename.doc).

Close document.

Re-open filename.doc.

Report results.

Okay, except for the fact that the file extension for Word 2007 is .docx, I did the test you suggested.

The resulting test.docx file does have the words in question (relatiely and bunkemty) underlined as errors, which is correct.

Does that tell you something about my original document?

Thanks,

Ah. My error.

It says there’s definitely something in the formatting of that paragraph that’s telling the spell checker to leave it alone. Does Word 2007 still have the “reveal formatting” command? On my version it’s on the Format menu. Click it, then highlight the paragraph (or vice versa, it actually works either way.) You may have to go a word at a time, I’m not intimately familiar with the tool and its options.

I had this happen in Word 2003 recently. Not only were misspelled words not underlined, but obviously correct words were underlined(the word and). It was just the one paragraph in the document that was doing this, and it was copied from another document where it worked just fine. I was under a deadline so I just spell checked the words in the first document, fixed em, saved it and sent it up. All our stuff gets proof-read prior to the client seeing it so the words underlined that were spelled correctly will get taken care of there. The one thing I couldn’t test was if this problem persisted on other systems or just mine.

-Otanx

That (eventually) got it. THANKS!

At first I couldn’t find a “reveal formatting” option. However, the ribbon (Word 2007’s replacement for the toolbars) had a “clear all formatting” button which worked to restore the spelling flags on the section.

I didn’t want to clear all formatting from my document, so I looked further. Under Styles there’s a button way down at the bottom of the window called “style inspector” button; and at the bottom, another little button which the mouseover tooltip named “reveal formatting,” which showed a dense list of style settings and “plus: <none>”, which sounded like there was no difference…but there’s also a checkbox “compare to another selection,” – and THAT stripped away all the formatting my two compared text selections had in common, showing (under the reveal codes pane) the difference: “do not check spelling or grammar” was turned off just for part of the paragraph (halfway through a sentence, in fact).

I didn’t even know you could do that on an (essentially) per-character basis; I’ve only thought about doing it for whole documents at a time (note that this document is conspicuously marked to check spelling and grammar, despite the fact that a small fragment of it has that turned off).

Good grief that was subtle, and I had to drill way down into menu panes and buttons and checkboxes to finally find it.

Just poking around this problem, I learned a lot about MS Word 2007 that will probably be useful later.

Thanks tons, this was really driving me crazy!!!

Happy to help.

Knead
Who hasn’t felt any actual improvements in Word since 1997.

The chosen language can be different for any selected text. Are you sure the chosen language is English etc for that selected text?

Thank you! The exact same thing had been bugging me in a set of documents I need to work on, and your instructions worked perfectly.