Spell-check in large documents
Dayo Mitchell
shouldn't be a problem, unless there's a mismatch between language assigned
and language used. But since your other message makes it clear you are on a
PC, try asking again on a non-macintosh group, and include version info.
DM
"avarghese" wrote:
> Is it possible that spell-check could fail for large documents. Some of my
> users complain that their spell-check fails for large documents. Word dosen't
> do the spell check beyond certain number of pages (about 150 pages).
> Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks
> Al
John McGhie [MVP - Word]
No. The size of the document has nothing to do with failed spell-checking.
The usual cause is language mis-setting (see below).
The spelling functionality is a separate thread, if Word can open the
document and the spelling checker at the same time, it can spell-check the
document in its entirety.
A Word document can contain up to 32 MB of plain text, NOT counting any
non-text content such as graphics. The total file size of a Word document
should not be allowed to exceed 2 Gigabytes. On a normal computer, the
handing of the document will become far too slow to work with well before
the file gets to 2 GB.
However when a user opens a long document with spelling checking enabled,
the spell-checking will occur in the background unless you specifically use
the Spelling function from the Tools menu. The background spelling happens
at a fairly low priority, so if the user skips a few hundred pages down the
document as soon as they open it, it can take a minute or so for the
background spelling checker to catch up. The user can force this by using
Spelling from the Tools menu.
If the delay is unacceptably long, make sure the machines the users have on
their desktops are sufficiently powerful for handling long documents. I
would not attempt long corporate documents on a machine with less than a 600
MHz processor or 256 MB of memory. (Actually, I *do* attempt this
sometimes: one client has me working on a machine with a 350 MHz processor.
I have smiled sweetly and reminded him that my time is *his* money, but so
far, he has not produced an upgrade :-))
If the spelling checker does not function at all, even after waiting, you
need to check on the language assigned to the text that fails to check. The
name of the language assigned to the text must exactly match (character for
character) the name of the language installed in Word. "English" is not
close enough. If you have "English US" installed and you come to text
marked as English UK, spell-checking is disabled.
You often find this problem in text that has changed from Mac to PC or vice
versa. The names of the languages in the older versions of Word did not
necessarily match between platforms, leading to text copied from older
documents failing to spell.
The other problem to watch for is text set to "No Proofing". Unskilled
users sometimes set text to "No Proofing" because they want to stop the red
squiggles and they can't be bothered checking in the help to see how to turn
Spelling off. Text marked with No Proofing will disable the spelling
checker. Really unskilled users have been known to set the language of the
Normal style to No Proofing, which disabled spelling for the entire
document.
When checking the spelling language, you need to check the text, the
paragraphs, the style, and the Normal style of a document. Any one of the
four can have a language setting. The language setting in use at a
particular point is the one "closest" to the text in that hierarchy: Text,
Paragraph, Style, Normal Style.
If you select a word and use Tools>Language, Word will tell you what the
language in use at that given point is. Be aware that the language of the
following word in the text can be different.
Hope this helps
This responds to article
<3624D1DB-60D2-4FFA...@microsoft.com>, from "avarghese"
<smart...@yahoo.com> on 7/4/04 2:26 AM:
> Is it possible that spell-check could fail for large documents. Some of my
> users complain that their spell-check fails for large documents. Word dosen't
> do the spell check beyond certain number of pages (about 150 pages).
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> Thanks
> Al
--
Please respond only to the newsgroup to preserve the thread.
John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:jo...@mcghie.name