Bizarre spelling issue in Word, any ideas?

David Jessop wrote:

Hello...

I am using a Macbook Air running the latest version of Mac OS X as well as Windows 7 in VMWare. I use Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows and Mac Office 2011.

Recently I received a translation project from a regular client and as I went about carrying out the translation in Word, squiggly lines appeared below the text as they normally do, indicating there were spelling errors. I revised them as I went and then did a spell check at the end of the project, after proofreading my work. Word detected some spelling/grammar errors as it normally does. Everything seemed fine.

Then I submitted the work to the client and to my surprise the client wrote back to tell me that several words were lumped together (by way of example: thisishowsometextappeared). How could this be when I had completed a spell check right before submitting my work?

I went back into Word (Windows) and ran spell check again. Word did not detect any spelling errors and said the spell check had completed. I did the same with Word (Mac OS) and the same thing happened.

I have never experienced anything like this. I've searched the Internet for others experience of this, including in Microsoft's help documentation, and cannot find anything. What is especially strange is the same error occurred in two different operating systems and two different Office packages (it's basically as if it occurred on two different computers).

Does anyone have any idea of how this would happen and what I can do to ensure it does not happen again?

Thanks for any help.

David

[Edited at 2012-03-11 07:56 GMT]

neilmac wrote:



This often happens with MACs running an MS Office program on a VM environment, they're supposed to be compatible but they aren't really 100%. And IMHO Windows 7 is ... let's just say it leaves a lot to be desired in the first place. I sometimes get the squiggly underline appearing in a document that has been treated with TM softwares like Trados or Wordfast too in these setups. I don't know how to fix it, so I try to stick to MS Office for translation work and avoid hybrid usage (my VM runs pretty slowly so I end up never using it).

Tom in London wrote:

This shouldn't happen if you're using Office for Mac (i.e. not running the VM machine)

[Edited at 2012-03-11 09:07 GMT]

David Jessop wrote:

It did indeed happen when I used Office for Mac.

But then after being alerted to the problem by the client and while attempting to solve it, I went back to Office for Mac and on the menu went to Word > Preferences > Spelling and Grammar > Recheck Document > Window appears stating: "This operation resets the spelling checker and the grammar checker so that Word will recheck words and grammar you previously checked and chose to ignore. Do you want to continue?" > Yes.

The above worked in this case. I suppose the solution would be to go through the above process for every document.

David

neilmac wrote:


Have you found that a solution is booting into Windows using Boot Camp and doing a final spell check rather than doing the final spell check in VMware solves the problem? Or is it actually necessary to do your final spell check on a non-Mac?

Thanks.

David

David Jessop wrote:



In these kind of cases I usually just make a TXT (unformatted text) copy of the doc from scratch on a Windows-dedicated PC and run the normal MS spellcheck, which also gets rid of the underline; the only problem is you have to reformat it again afterwards if you want to stick to same format as the original (a condition I try to avoid).

David Jessop wrote:

I went back into Word (Windows) and ran spell check again. Word did not detect any spelling errors and said the spell check had completed. I did the same with Word (Mac OS) and the same thing happened.

Daniel Grau wrote:

language is not a Word setting, but a text attribute. You must apply a given language by selecting the text and then going to Tools > Language, just like you would apply bold or color.