Word 2004: Hopeless spell checker doesn’t know the meaning of ‘Ignore All’

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Microsoft
March 25th, 2005 • 1:37 am

You know your software is buggy beyond repair when it cannot even get the simplest things right.

For most of my spell checking needs, I use Spell Catcher X. However, as a precautionary measure, I also sometimes use Word’s built-in spell checker to go through my documents one more time before declaring them fit for human consumption.

Spell Catcher X does have a feature that lets you select your entire document and run its own spell checker through it — but it is not (and cannot be) as fully integrated into Word as Word’s own spell checker, so there are sometimes problems with complex documents containing lots of tables, etc. (Spell Catcher copies the text as rich text, runs it through its spell checker, and then reinserts it as rich text.)

So yesterday I used Word’s spell checker on a long document that I had been working on for the past few weeks. Predictably, it contained a number of words (proper nouns, etc.) that Word didn’t know. Each time I encountered one of them, I clicked on the “Ignore All” button in Word’s spell checker window. And each time Word encountered another occurrence of the same unknown word, it would stop again!

This is right up there with Word’s spell checker stopping at every occurrence of “etc.“.

Obviously there’s something seriously broken with Word’s spell checker. Honestly I don’t care what it is, and I don’t expect Microsoft to fix it within the next ten years, so all I can do is encourage everyone to get Spell Catcher X and use Word’s spell checker as little as possible.


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