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Showing posts from March 11, 2020

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 rig