Office 2007 Contextual Spelling Checker

June 6th, 2006

I didn’t know this until today but I found out today that Office 2007 has a contextual spelling checker. In previous versions, you can miss a mis-spelling when a word is spelt correctly but it’s incorrect in that context. If the spelling is incorrect in the context, you’ll see a blue squiggly underline.

Office 2000 vs Office 2007

The top screenshot was taken in Office 2007; the bottom one was taken in Office 2000.

In this case, the sentences are gramatically incorrect so the grammar checker finds it anyway but there are cited examples of correct spelling and grammar which are wrong in the context.

The blog gives an example:

Take the following example, which is grammatically (i.e. syntactically) correct:

How do your two roles compliment each other?

In this context, the verb complement (with -e-) should be used instead of compliment. The traditional spell-checker cannot spot that mistake since both verbs exist in the lexicon and that tool does not know anything about the context. The grammar checker does not see the problem because the syntactic analysis relies upon information about the part of speech of the words and the sentence is correct in this respect.

Very useful!