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I've got a strange issue with MS Word that I'm hoping someone can help me fix. I have a list of words with some that are misspelled, and I'm hoping to have MS Word automatically pick up on these misspelled words. For some reason, spell check doesn't seem to pick up the misspelled words. I have to manually add a space behind each word for spell check to notice it, and this "sometimes" work and sometimes not. For some words, I would manually add a space and MS word wouldn't pick up on it (eg. "iii"), even though in a new blank document, spellcheck would pick up on the exact same word. I provide an image sample of the list below. I thought it may be something to do with text formatting, so I tried to copy the list into excel/ notepad and copy the text back into a new MS Word, but would still have the problem of spell check not picking up on it.
*Sample image below
I want spellcheck to automatically pick up on these misspelled words because I hope to run a batch delete macro that deletes all misspelled words from the list. There are hundreds of documents, each document having thousands of pages, so automation is important. How can I get spellcheck to pick up on all misspelled words? Why is spellcheck only randomly picking up some words? Acknowledging that latin words may be a factor, but if so, why is it sometimes deeming eg. iii to be misspelled and other times not? And if latin words is a factor, is there a way for MS Word spellcheck to deem all latin words as misspelled? For context, this list of words is copied from a pdf file that's been converted to word text with OCR. Thanks for any help!
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Answer accepted by question author
Word marks this as misspelled because it is "Iii" instead of "iii," thanks to the automatic capitalization of the beginning of a paragraph. If it were "III," it would not be marked.
"Do not check spelling or grammar" is in the Language dialog box (Review tab > Language group > Language > Set Proofing Language). The setting is an attribute that can be applied to selected text (one or more text characters).
As Charles wrote, Word will start checking the spelling as you press the SpaceBar, because that is how the spellchecker can tell that you have finished typing the whole word.
As background:
First, select one of the things that should have been flagged and check it's language setting (this may be in your Status bar) for "Do not check" being checked.
Second, some of the items like iii are unlikely to be checked unless you add them to an Exclusion list because they are valid Roman numerals.
Often Word will not start checking spelling until it knows the word is finished. (Space, punctuation, Enter.)
Hi Suzanne, thank you fo your advice! I changed the first letter of each word to capitals and that did the trick. It marked all non English three letter words as incorrectly spelt, so I can delete it in one go. My problem is now solved :)
Thank you Charles, I've checked the language setting and it doesn't have "do not check" as being checked. Do you know if there's any way or any code to spell check all non english words or uncommon three letter acronyms? Further do you know why MS Word behaves in an inconsistent manner. For example "iii" in the sample image I provided wasn't spell checked. But if I open a new blank MS Word and type "iii" followed by space, MS word would mark it as misspelled as can be seen by below image.