Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Spelling and Grammar

Whatever your document—term paper, resumé, or letter to the milkman—typos can hinder its effectiveness and sully your credibility. When you let mistakes remain in your document, your reader may doubt that you put any time or care into it at all. Word helps you achieve the perfect result by pointing out possible errors, leaving the final call up to you.

Tip

A spelling-related feature may have been benefiting you without you even noticing. When you incur a typo that even a Sominex-drugged reader would notice, such as wodnerful or thier, Word makes the correction automatically, instantly, and quietly. (Press ⌘-Z or F1 immediately afterward if you actually intended the misspelled version.) Technically, Word is using its spelling dictionaries as fodder for its AutoCorrect feature, as described on AutoCorrect.

As a bonus, the spell checker is smart enough to recognize run-together words (such as intothe and giveme) and propose the split-apart versions as corrected spellings.

There are two basic modes to Word’s spelling and grammar features:

Check Spelling as You Type

Word’s factory setting is to check spelling and grammar continuously, immediately flagging any error it detects as soon as you finish typing it. Each spelling error gets a red, squiggly underline; each grammatical error gets a green one. These squiggly underlines (which also appear in the other Office programs) are among the most noticeable hallmarks of Office documents, as shown in Figure 2-8.

If you can spot ...