How to Check the Spelling and Grammar in Microsoft Office Word 2007

All right, we are now ready to check our spelling and our grammar here in our document. Now, you may have noticed that as we have been working along that some words have red squiggly underlines and other words have squiggly underlines. Now the red underline indicates what Word thinks is the spelling mistake and the green underline is what Word is catching as a grammatical error. So let us see how this is going to work.

So the first thing that I am going to do is place my insertion plan at the very top of my document just before my title there, Web Design Primer. And then up on my review tab, I am going to head over to the left to my spelling and grammar. I am going to click on that. And right away, Word is picking this up as a spelling mistake and it is giving me this as the suggestion. So I have obviously misspelled structure. Now, what I can do over on the right hand side is I can choose Ignore Once. In other words, ignore this occurrence, ignore all occurrences. I can change just this occurrence or I can change all occurrences. I am going to click on change. The Word corrects my mistake and goes on to the next one. And there is individual, which is also a mistake there. So again, I am going to click on change. The next result Word has brought up is what it has caught as a grammatical error and it is giving me a suggestion here but I am going to choose Ignore Once. We could continue on here but I am just going to close my spelling and grammar dialog box. That is how spelling and grammar works in Word.

A new component to Word 2007 is something called Research. So what I am going to do in my document here is I am going to make a selection here. I am going to select the phrase Web Design here and then up on my review tab, inside my proofing category, I am going to click on research. That opens up the research pane over on this side here. Now, what I can do is can type in some text here if I want to search for it or make a selection which I have done and I am going to click on my Start Searching button here and Word has returned to me some results. So it has searched my dictionary, the World Wide Web, it has given me some results here. And down towards the bottom, it has also given me a thesaurus option here as well as – and again this is something else that is new in Word 2007 – is translations. So what it has done here is it is taking my selection here and translates it from English to French or what I could do here is translate from English to German. And now I get my German translation.

At the top underneath all reference books, I can open up this pull down menu here and specify precisely what it is that I want to search. There is my translation again, my encyclopedia, I can do an MSN search and more. To close over your research pane, just click on the X on the top right corner. Rather than using the research button, I can go directly to the thesaurus or I can go directly to translate as well. Also in my proofing category, I have my word count. Now, because I have a selection, Word is only going to include those words that are part of that selection so I only have two words here. So I am going to close this. I am just going to place a single insertion point here and then go back to my word count. Word tells me that I have a five page document with over 2200 words in it with over 10,000 characters. Again, I can make a selection here so I will select the paragraph and go back up to my word count and now it is telling me I have 69 words with over 300 characters. The word count is very handy. If you have to do a lot of writing especially for essays or myself, I write a lot of articles and this sort of thing. Now, you can use the word count option up underneath the review tab but you also have the word count option available all the time down on your status bar.