Spell Checking in Microsoft Word
April 30th, 2008My girlfriends computer has Windows Vista installed in Danish but has the UK version of Office 2003 Professional so I was rather surprised this week that I couldn’t change the spell check language in Word 2003 to Danish.
I had (rather naively as it turns out) just assumed that something costing as much as Office 2003 would also include a pile of dictionaries for spell checking, how wrong could I be.
To achieve what I wanted I’d actually have to buy Microsoft Office Proofing Tools 2003, which seems hard right now as all the sites I looked at showed it as discontinued!
To put this in context I use OpenOffice on Linux (cost zero) and installing a new dictionary takes me about 1 minutes using yum (cost also zero).
On a similar theme I was recently helping a friend with her computer when she asked me if she should buy Microsoft Word for her pc just so she can read Word attachments that are sent to her. She had very basic requirements and was not at all computer literate.
It struck me that for most people if they are sent a Word document they will of course assume they need Word to view the file, Microsoft Office document formats are so ubiquitous that many people just connect any text file with Word.
The idea that people fork out for Microsoft Word just for this purpose horrifies me when there are many free alternatives available. But of course knowledge is power in my case, many people are not so lucky.