Problems with "Custom dictionary" in Word 2008 for Mac (an..

Hi;

I just got the new student version of Word 2008 for Mac. Whenever I
open an old document or look at a new one for a second time I get the
"The custom dictionary is not available" message.I cannot make new
custom dictionaries permanent. It drives my crazy since I need to
spell-check a lot of technical documents (in chemistry)

Can anybody help. What is going on?


Oh and for you chemists out there: You cannot lift a ChemDraw drawing
from the new Word 2008 and copy it back into ChemDraw to edit
it....any ideas how to get around this ??

That means that the spelling language of the text in the document is causing
the spell checker to attempt to open a custom dictionary that does not
exist.

That must be because you have set the custom dictionary to have a
"Language".

Unless you are working across multiple languages, we recommend that you have
only one custom dictionary, and that you set it to "No language" so that it
works in all the text languages you encounter (there are potentially 29
flavours of English).

In the Word help, review the help topic " Create and use a custom
dictionary".

What the Help DOESN'T tell you is how to resolve this problem.

1) Go to Word>Preferences>Spelling and Grammar>Dictionaries...

2) Check the checkbox beside the custom dictionary you want to use (there
should only be one, named Custom Dictionary)

3) Change the Language to (none) and click OK and OK.

That's it.

If the custom dictionary is set to a specific language, Word can use it only
for text set in that particular language. If you set it to (none) the
custom dictionary words are available in all documents you may open.

Now select some text in the document you were looking at, and go to
Tools>Language... And see which language is highlighted.

Make sure it's the version of English you want to use. If it isn't, select
the whole document and correct it. Otherwise, you will get the wrong
spellings throughout the document.

Sorry: The only "cure" for the ChemDraw problem is "don't use Word 2008".
I expect there will be a new version of ChemDraw released eventually that
produces images that are compatible with Word 2008.

It's best not to put multiple questions in a single post. The people
answering in here are "specialists". They won't open a post unless the
heading looks to be within their area.

ChemDraw users don't do "Spelling", spelling users know little about
ChemDraw! And none of us have time to read every post :-)

Hope this helps


On 10/02/08 5:24 PM, in article
043df556-fb67-48e1-a151-976094a3c0c7.DeleteThis@i7g2000prf.googlegroups.com, "dirk"
wrote:

> Hi;
>
> I just got the new student version of Word 2008 for Mac. Whenever I
> open an old document or look at a new one for a second time I get the
> "The custom dictionary is not available" message.I cannot make new
> custom dictionaries permanent. It drives my crazy since I need to
> spell-check a lot of technical documents (in chemistry)
>
> Can anybody help. What is going on?
>
>
> Oh and for you chemists out there: You cannot lift a ChemDraw drawing
> from the new Word 2008 and copy it back into ChemDraw to edit
> it....any ideas how to get around this ??

--
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John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:john@mcghie.name