Tip: Office for Mac 2011 spell checker

Certain documents can pose problems when spell checking, particularly ones with mixtures of English and foreign languages. Microsoft's Office for Mac 2011 has some easy ways of dealing with these documents.

In a recent tip on the Mac Business Unit's Office for Mac blog, evangelist Kurt Schmucker offers a pair suggestions for improving spell checking in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The first tip concerns a paragraph written in a foreign language that Office 2011 understands. If the default spell check setting is English, of course, it will flag every word in a foreign language. That may not be such as burden for a phrase or two, but a whole paragraph or multiple paragraphs can be a problem.

By using the Language menu item in the Tools menu, you can define the language of each paragraph in the document! Very useful.

You’ll find that when the language of a text passage is correctly set, Word will automatically invoke the correct spell check. Adjust your own setting by going to the Language… menu item on the Tools menu in Word. (And in similar locations in Excel and PowerPoint.) Given that this is an example of a Word feature that is not in the ribbon, you need to access this from the Word menus.

Ah, the hateful Ribbon ... I'm glad to avoid it.

Check out: Oh the horror! Why is Microsoft pushing the hated Windows Ribbon for Office:Mac?

In his second tip, Schmucker tries to spell check a paragraph in Latin, which isn't supported by a built-in dictionary. There he shows how to disable the spell check for that paragraph. Another great tip.