infobong.com

I used to hate Microsoft Office's realtime spellcheck and grammar check functionality. I found all the green and red underlining distracting when I was trying to crank out a paper. I used to turn them off when I logged on to a lab machine, but, I think it improved considerably with Office 2000, because I don't remember even noticing the feature after I finished college. Even more frustrating is the Autocorrect feature which seems to refuse to allow me to correctly type "bell hooks" or "ICTs," changing the capitalization even if I correct the correction multiple times.

As I've writing furiously here at the end of the semester, I've noticed that my papers are peppered with egregious typographical errors, and I wondered "How is this happening?" I've had to go back and correct errors that are normally fixed as they happened, and I realized, "I didn't install any spelling or grammar dictionaries when I rebuilt my hard drive." I was trying to keep the Microcruft to a minimum when I did a clean re-install, and as a result, I'm not able to even run a spell check, so now I need to figure out how to install these indispensible featuers.

UpdateAs a sidenote, after I installed the spelling and grammar "dictionaries" to my machine, I quicklly discovered I had to add "blog," "blogs," "blogger," and "blogging" to the local dictionary. "Blog" may be the word of the year for 2004, but Office 2000 thinks its a typo. Does anyone know if Office XP or Office 2003 include "blog"? I'm still using the copy of Office that came with the huge bundle of software Microsoft sent me when I was writing for computer magazines.