How to Fix Microsoft Word Spell Check Problems: 8 Tips and Fixes – Recent Posts

Technology in terms you understand. Sign up for the Confident Computing newsletter for weekly solutions to make your life easier. Click here and get The Ask Leo! While both of these activities look like automatic formatting, Word looks at them several different ways.

Become a Patron of Ask Leo! In each are the settings that will allow you to control just how much you want Word to do. Click the image above for a short video showing you how to turn on full menus in Microsoft Word, and find the AutoCorrect Options menu item. Windows Media 9 format, , bytes. As you can see, Word has a number of options to automatically do things for you. But thankfully once discovered, Word actually allows you to control if and what it attempts to do on your behalf.

Subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week. I have all auto-formatting and auto-correct turned off.

I do not want Word to think for me because it usually is wrong. The problem I have is with styles. Word continually changes the style from normal to something else. This affects the font, font size, indentation, margins, etc… I want everything to be normal, I will make any changes from normal.

How can I prevent Word from automatically changing the style? Formating marks are on typing area. To close to formating marks. I have MS Word For some reason Word wants to format the entire document whenever I apply formatting to selected text. What is also strange is when I click the undo arrow button Word then appropriately formats the text that I wanted it to. I have turned all the items off in automatic format. I am creating a document that has two fonts in it. I can reverse the change by hitting the undo automatic format.

Solved my most annoying problem with Word Automatic Style Update. Thank you so much for the WebSite Kelly. How can I get it to do these other fractions as well? There is nothing to auto replace with. A lot of trouble to use, though. Leo made that comment in There is Auto numbering that takes place. Butr some letters and numbers did exist. On Nov. I use the standard Times and Times New Roman fonts. Thanks for the advice. I have exactly the same problem see below!

Word and Windows XP. This is driving me crazy. Do you have any ideas? Leo — I am using Word v It is especially evident when I am cutting and pasting. Is this a major bug in Word ? Please help! When I receive from someone else a Word file that has fraction characters in it, the fraction displays on my screen as an underscore. Is there something that I can do to get it to display correctly in Word? If I cut-n-paste the text into Mail, the fraction displays correctly. Occaisionally when I highlight one line and click to add a bullet to this line, every line in the document has bulletts added to it.

This does not just happen to bullett points, sometimes it is the footer of a document, which adds lines to itself, whils I am formatting the body of the doucment. These lines can be manually removed, but again this is frustrating and time consuming. I also have read everything there is and followed every instruction for turning of all automatic formatting and yet it still does happens and I absolutely hate it.

It definitely interferes with my work — where I have to create documents with lots of different formats. I, too, have all the AutoCorrect options deselected turned off and Word for Mac continues to make changes. Has anyone figured out how to work around this bug? I had the same problem with deselecting the Autocorrect options in Outlook — actually I deselected ALL of them and nothing worked..

I just want to turn ALL auto formatting off. With the exception of fractions and 1st, 2nd stufff. I am unable to copy and paste a group of friends into another page without transferring the live web link effect. I work with MS Office Word My problem is that once I turn off all of the Autocorrect options, after every reboot of my computer and sometimes even after hibernation all of the options I had deselected revert to their original state, and Microsoft Word once again autoformats everything until I turn off all the options again!

This is insane! I have to reset the autocorrect options — as well as all the other options General, Edit, Save, Spelling, etc. Is there some way to permanently freeze the settings?

Or is there at least some way to save a template of such settings? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Then select the style you want to fix — it will appear, with a bunch of other styles, on the right side of the screen. Thank you Dan for your post. Ctrl-Z was getting used more than save. It was definitely not an intuitive fix. Thanks to all who have posted on this topic. I am using Word , V None of the messages posted here solved the problem, but they did get me to the point where I think I have figured it out.

No Response is needed. Thank you so much! This was incredibly valuable conversation to resolve a frustrating problem. How do I turn off formatting symbols in outlook ?

I hit some combo of buttons and now with every new e-mail I get the formatting symbols. When you edit a message, click on the icon in the ribbon that looks like a backwards P. I think. Is there any way to permanently stop this from happening? How damned arrogant of Microsoft to introduce such a disruptive process with no means of effective escape.

Like the others I want to remove the date update feature but it does it even when the check box is clear.

I just hate using word these days. Office is a nightmare. Bill Gates needs a big kick up the arse. Even though all boxes are unchecked, automatic styles update turned off, it is STILL messing up my attempts to edit the document that was sent to me. If I make a change on page 13, that is supposed to be only on page 13, I go back and see that the same change appears all through the document.

Leo did not read the complete question. I have fought and worked with this question for about a year and cannot find out how to turn it off permanently in normal. Your settings are not being retained. Thanks, Leo, I guess my Word installation has a deep inside problem. I have unchecked all of the many AutoFormat boxes dozens of times in the past five years, but every time I open a new document which starts with normal. Oh well, I guess I will just have to uncheck all boxes every time I start a new document.

Thanks again, Lloyd. I have been fighting a big document for a long time, and had deselected everything I could think of. Everytime I made one change it would go through the whole document and apply that one change bold, bullet, etc.

Then, when I tired to Ctrl-Z it, it would say there were too many edits and would shut down. This fixed it and I can actually work with it now — I really appreciate it!

– How to disable Microsoft Word AutoCorrect feature

Word includes the ability to display toolbar icons in two sizes: regular and large. You can turn on the large icons by Have you ever chosen to edit a comment, only to find that the comment is quite a ways from the cell with which it is Do you need to create a number of words or phrases where you only alter a few letters in each one?

If the alterations The First and Last Word on Word! Bestselling For Dummies author Dan Gookin puts his usual fun and friendly candor back to work to show you how to navigate Word Spend more time working and less time trying to figure it all out!

Check out Word For Dummies today! Have you ever had a line appear on your document that you can’t seem to get rid of? It could be due to a built-in Type a few dashes, underscores, or equal signs, and you could end up with a full-width line in your document. This is Want an easy way to add lines in your document?

You can do it by making sure Word is using one of its AutoFormat features. Enter your address and click “Subscribe. Your e-mail address is not shared with anyone, ever.

Maximum image size is 6Mpixels. Images larger than px wide or px tall will be reduced. Up to three images may be included in a comment. All images are subject to review. Commenting privileges may be curtailed if inappropriate images are posted. Reading all the comments reconfirms me in my view that Microsoft needs to acquire the rights to WordPerfect and introduce its most useful features into Word. In some ways Word is still clunky.

Top of the priority list is Reveal Codes. MS’s ‘version’ is poor in comparison. For those who don’t know, in WordPerfect you can actually see all the formatting codes and delete or insert in the exact places as necessary. Next is paragraph numbering and formatting. No, I no longer use WordPerfect, but was once a ‘power user’.

Just to say this tip was very helpful. On doing a quick search of the web could not find this simple instruction at all on the MS site.

Thank you, Allen! I already get your tip-emails. Unfortunately this tip didn’t help my case with word, but it was a good tip to venture into the option settings to attempt a fix. My case was more to fix auto indenting when a word file has columns.

Where the 2nd column wouldnt stop auto indenting and backspacing into the next indent rather then flush with the column start. The workaround was filling in text from the bottom of the 1st column to fill in to the 2nd column then start the section I originally intended to write, where I wanted to write it.

Then backspace all the filler text out until my original 2nd column starts flush at the top. Thank you, Allen, this was driving me mad! Isn’t it funny how Word can do that?! Hmm – it looks like I’ve finally solved it. The text that I was editing had tab stops set within the paragraph formatting, and I think that this was causing the behaviour. Once I removed all tab stops, things seemed to work properly.

What’s odd is that I found this tip while searching for the exact opposite! I’m used to using tab to indent the first line of a paragraph, but I’ve just purchased a new PC, and it’s not behaving like my old PC!

The tab key merely inserts a tab character, even though the “set left- and first-indent with tabs and backspaces” checkbox is checked. Any advice would be highly appreciated! I think the easiest way to indent is to use the double upper, lower left-hand margin indicators in the ruler.

Highlight the paragraph, slide the top margin indicator to the indent you want. I have Samsung Galaxy Tab A6 and the above does suggestion dows not show how to stop the whole papargraph indenting when I add in a number at the start of the paragraph.

Therefore I typed in the paragraph where I wanted it to be aligned then went back and added in the numbers of each point later. However in both adding the numbers in before or after parafraphs are typed results in the wholeparagraph indenting which I didn’t want to do.

This did not occur in a similar document I typed before the current one and the only change I made was to the font size. The body of the letter on the other hand stays at 1. I am writing a manuscript. I set both margins at 0″. Now go ahead and define the required AutoCorrect rules for replacing erroneous text. Similar to the Windows version, Excel ships rules to correct common capitalization and hyperlinks keyboard mistakes as well as define custom rules.

F7 does work as expected. What am I missing? You must be logged in to post a comment. Applicability: Office , , ; Office and Standard. How to run spelling check in Excel? First things first, the Excel spell checker is located in the Review tab. In order to proof check your worksheet text, follow this process: Open your workbook and navigate to your worksheet.

In the Ribbon, open the Review tab. Hit on Spelling. Your worksheet will be analyzed for errors, and Excel will provide suggested corrections in the Spelling dialog.

In case of false-positives, you could Add to Dictionary relevant words or terms. Alternatively, hitting the F7 button will achieve the same results.

Once done, hit on OK. Save your work as needed. Enable Auto-Correct in Excel The Spelling dialog which we just reviewed in the section above also allows you to trigger an AutoCorrect action.