Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: Limiting a Spelling Check.

Limiting a Spelling Check

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated August 24, 2021)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016


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Cathy routinely creates 1000+ page documents with table names and abbreviations that stop Word's spellchecker in its tracks. Checking the spelling of such huge documents is very time-consuming, and Cathy feels it would be much more efficient if she could skip certain sections of text in the document. She wondered if there is a way to make the spelling checker skip over sections of text and begin or resume its review at a spot that she can determine manually.

There are two things you can try. First of all, if your abbreviations are standardized in any manner, such that they are used in lots of your documents, just add the abbreviations to the custom dictionary used by the spelling checker. While this may take a while, it will mean much faster spell checking as your custom dictionary grows to be more representative of the types of documents you create.

The second thing to try is based on the reality that, in Word, "language" is a text attribute, like typeface or color. Word's spell checker determines how to check text based on the language in which the text has been formatted. Thus, if you have French and English in the same document, Word will check the whole document in one pass, switching language tools based on the language formatting applied to different parts of text.

If you don't want Word to check the spelling of certain text, it can be formatted as "No Proofing," which can be viewed as just another language designation for that text. To do this select the text, display the Review tab of the ribbon, click Set Language in the Proofing group, then choose the Do Not Check Spelling checkbox.

If you want to turn off proofing for large sections of your document, you may want to define a paragraph style that has the proofing turned off. This style can then be easily applied to various paragraphs, as needed. For instance, you could have a style called Body Text, and then create a new style, based on Body Text, called Body Text NP. The only difference would be that the Body Text NP style would have proofing turned off. Once you were satisfied with the spelling and grammar in a paragraph, switch that paragraph's style to Body Text NP, and it won't be checked in the future.

If you prefer to use a macro to explicitly turn off proofing for a block of text, the following will work just fine. Select the text you want to format in this manner, and then run the macro.

Sub NoProofing()
    Selection.NoProofing = True
End Sub

The only possibly unpleasant artifact of turning off proofing for text is that Word's automatic hyphenation tool will not work for text formatting in that way.

Note:

If you would like to know how to use the macros described on this page (or on any other page on the WordTips sites), I've prepared a special page that includes helpful information. Click here to open that special page in a new browser tab.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (10974) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Limiting a Spelling Check.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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Comments

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2023-05-18 21:00:04

John

Thanks so much for this. Concise, informative and complete.


2019-01-02 07:01:30

Jim Orrell

I am sure that in the past I could make a text selection (be it 1 word, or many) press F7 and get a quick spell check for just that selection. Now if I do that Word 365 starts to check the whole document, and as your article suggests this can take ages.

Do you know of a way to check just a selection?

The only workaround for this behaviour I can find is to drop the text into a smaller document and check it there.


2017-07-29 08:58:30

Ken Endacott

Setting No Proofing using Review > Set Language > Do Not Check Spelling only works for a selection of less than 50 paragraphs. If the selection is larger then the No Proofing settings are not changed. However the macro will change the setting for any selection size.

If a paragraph’s style has No Proofing then this can be overwritten for the whole paragraph or just for selected words by Review > Set Language or by the NoProofing macro but this can be reverted back to the style’s setting by re-applying the style or by CTRL + SPACE.

It is not possible from inspection to determine to what text NoProofing is applied. I use a macro that highlights text that has No Proofing applied.

If the number of spelling errors exceeds approximately 1400 then the display of errors by a wiggly line underneath the word is automatically turned off by “ Hide spelling errors…” . No Proofing of blocks of text can be used to reduce the number of errors in the remainder of the document to below the threshold. To then see the errors it is necessary to turn off “ Hide spelling errors…” at File > Options > Proofing.


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