The joys of Word or the joy of words?

When Word red-underlines things like we'll, they'd, hadn't etc., you might be excused for thinking the program's gone crazy. And you might be right. The problem, if you happen to be running spellcheck (or even trying to read without distraction), is to figure out which particular kind of crazy. After all, those red underlines do kind of draw the eye, distracting from the joy of the author's words. So what's an editor to do?

As usual, the first answer is to try Google. Then try asking the same question 300 different ways. And finally, fix it. Which means I've now learned how to tell Word that certain words are not English (and that others are), and how to make Word make all the wrongly flagged Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish words revert to English (US) - or even English (UK) or English (Australian) if desired. So here's how it's done:

• Open your document.
• Go to one of those wrongly flagged words, and right click, then select language to determine which language Word thinks the word is written in.
• Now open the advanced search dialog and the find/replace tab.
• Do not type any words or characters to be found or replaced. Instead, click in "find what," then click on the format button at the bottom of the box. Click on language, and choose the language you want to remove.
• Then click in the "replace with" box, followed by format and language, and choose English.
• Then replace all.

Easy, right? Though how 8 different languages crept into one English file is a mystery yet to be solved.

The joys of Word, the joy of words, and the joy of editing, all in one!