Spell check not working properly?

[aalaan]

Here's one for you Suzanne. (I mention you by name because you seem to
spend your life on here, helping strugglers like me!).

I have Word 2000 on Windows 98.

The spell check often lets mis-spelled words go - DINNING (when I meant
DINING) comes to mind. I've looked in my dictionaries and dinning
doesn't appear to be an actual word of its own. It is not in the custom
dictionary so I haven't accidentally added it during a previous spell
check. Is there a way of editing it out of the main english
(Australian) dictionary.

The other thing that happens is that the spellcheck seems to isolate
just the parts of words that I'd previously edited using the track
changes option. So for example I may have changed HOPING to HOPED and
spell then highlights the ED on its own and thinks it's a mistake. Any
comments?

One other thing, sometimes find won't pick up a sequence of charcetres
but if I delete and retype them it now does!

I've tested the files in question by saving them as HTM, which appeared
to pick up the normal.dot curruption I previously suffered (and I've
started a completely fresh normal. dot after renaming the old one), and
toggled on the prompt me....

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I suspect "dinning" *is* a word (making a loud noise), but you don't have to
accept it; see http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/ExcludeWordFromDic.htm. I
do often see Word transiently marking words as misspelled when something is
changed in them or even in their vicinity. I'm editing a novel with a
character named Zara, and I either added the name to the custom dictionary
or told Word to Ignore All. If the latter, I wouldn't expect the setting to
persist between sessions, but perhaps that feature has been improved since
the last time I worked on a document with a lot of weird names. At any rate,
today I changed the punctuation after one of the occurrences of the word,
and Word insisted on marking it as misspelled even though other instances
were not marked. Even when I retyped the word, it still wouldn't accept it
until I gave up and chose Ignore All (again).

I suspect that "Check spelling as you type" is always going to be a little
flaky; if you're seeing the same thing when you run the spell check
explicitly, then that might argue a different problem. Other factors that
could be in play are change tracking (Word may have difficulty "seeing" the
correct spelling as long as there are tracked changes splitting a word) and
language settings; it's always possible that all or part of a word has
somehow gotten marked as a different language or as "Do not check spelling
or grammar."

In the final analysis, spell check (and grammar check even more) is a
convenience not to be depended on too heavily and not to be taken so
seriously that it keeps you from working in Word.