"Add to Dictionary" grayed out

[MikeM]

I've just installed Office 2007, after a reimaging of WinXP Pro. Office 2003
is no longer present. I've copied my old Custom.dic dictionary to
AppData/Microsoft/UProof under my user name. Word 2007 seems to read this
dictionary in that my many specialty science words are not flagged as
misspelled. However, I cannot add any new words to the dictionary. When I
R-click, "Ignore" and "Ignore All" are functional, but "Add to dictionary" is
grayed out and doesn't allow any additions. My Custom.dic is large (57K) but
not yet to the 64K limit. It's not marked read only and I can edit it with
Notepad. I can't find anything in Google to help, and though I've possibly
missed something in this group, I've read pretty far back and can't find
anything like this. Any suggestions? Thanks.
--
Mike Maguire
http://pharmacology.case.edu/department/faculty/primary/maguire.html

[Claudio Porcellana]

may be I can help

I had the same problem every now and again and today I did a discovery
for some reason that I don't know, and MS tech team doesn't know too
Word kills randomly custom.dic putting inside a lot of blunders and/or
removing most personal words

so, I retrieved an old custom.dic from an old backup and all is fine:
Add to dictionary is coloured again!

this is why my policy is now to regularly backup custom.dic

warm regards

Claudio

-------------

[MikeM]

Thanks, I went back to an even older backup. I renamed Custom.dic in the
UProof subdirectory to OLDCustom.dic, copied the backup in and opened Word.
Unfortunately it didn't work. It's clearly reading from the custom.dic
dictionary because of some of the words it's not flagging and because of some
of the words it's suggesting, but the 'add to dict' is still grayed out. The
curioous thing is that this older file is 77K in size, far over the 64K
limit. Did office 2007 get rid of that limit?

--
Mike Maguire
http://pharmacology.case.edu/department/faculty/primary/maguire.html

[Jay Freedman]

Here are some facts about custom dictionaries that may help:

- A custom dictionary in most cases is a simple text file that can be opened and
edited in Notepad. If the dictionary is intended for a particular language, the
first line contains the notation #LID followed by the numeric identifier; for
example, a dictionary explicitly for English (UK) starts with #LID 2057. An "all
languages" dictionary doesn't have that line.

- There is no size limit. According to http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=211489
the help for Word 2000 had an erroneous statement that the limit is 366,590
bytes, but that has been corrected.

To restore your Add To Dictionary command, try this (no guarantees, though!):

- In the Custom Dictionaries dialog, select and remove all custom dictionaries.

- Move the existing files out of UProof to some other folder.

- Use the Custom Dictionaries dialog to create a new, empty dictionary. Close
Word.

- Open your OLDCustom.dic in one copy of Notepad, and open the new empty
custom.dic in another copy of Notepad. Use copy/paste to transfer the existing
words to the new file, save, and close.

- Reopen Word and try adding words to the dictionary. If you're lucky, it will
work. (Waving a rubber chicken over your computer may also work!)

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all
may benefit.

On Fri, 4 Apr 2008 07:52:01 -0700, MikeM <Mi...@discussions.microsoft.com>
wrote:

[MikeM]

That worked, many thanks. Sorry so long in replying, out sick then moving
daughter into apt.

--
Mike Maguire
http://pharmacology.case.edu/department/faculty/primary/maguire.html

[Indie]

In my case, the problem was that I copied the dictionary from Word 2003 to
Word 2007 thinking it would be compatible, how wrong I was.

The encoding of CUSTOM.DIC needs to be changed to Unicode for it to work
with Word 2007 - just open the file in Notepad and do Save As then for the
Encoding select Unicode. Grrr..

[MikeM]

I actually got a message saying that it had to be in Unicode when I tried to
follow what Jay Freedman suggested, pasting the text of the old Custom.dic
into a new blank one, so i just saved it in Unicode. Whether that was the
problem with the graying out or just a side issue I don't know, but it's all
working now.

--
Mike Maguire
http://pharmacology.case.edu/department/faculty/primary/maguire.html

[Doug]

Thanks your information worked for me. Seems like this shouldn't be
necessary, but I much appreciate being able to add names, etc. to my Custom
dicionary again.

[Taller.One]

Dear Jay Freedman,

Your help sorted the problem immediately.
Many thanks and kind regards, Kari M

[saddas]

Jay, this worked for me too. Thanks.

[Collin]

Had the same kind of problem. Here's the fix that worked for me:

Word>Preferences>Spelling and Grammar>

Hit the "Dictionaries" button by the "Custom Dictionary" text, and make sure
your custom dictionary is selected. When I installed Snow Leopard it somehow
became unselected and I just discovered how to get it back.

[Ena]

Had the same problem and googled to your item and others. Got the best
reason for my circumstance from another source. The reason for my grey-out
was that my Custom dictionary was set to a different language to that of my
document (New Zealand English for my custom dictionary against UK English for
my document). To fix in WORD 2007, navigate through:

Word Options
Proofing
Custom Dictionaries

In the resulting "Dictionary List" window the CUSTOM.DIC file lower portion
of the resulting window will be preceeded in the line above with the name of
the Dictionary language. If this is not the same language as the document
that you are currently working in then the "Add to Dictionary" option in the
right mouse click menu list will be greyed out.

To rectify things so that the custom dictionary will work in whatever
language document that you are working in (I work in a few):

select "CUSTOM.DIC"
go to "Dictionary language:" (find a drop down
list); and
select "All languages:" (found at the
top of the list)
OK, OK

Now my custom dictionary is working fine.