When Caitlin uses Word, she can configure how it marks grammar errors. When someone opens the same document on their system, the grammar is checked according to how they have their configuration set up. Caitlin wonders if there is a way to embed her grammar preferences within a document so that other recipients view the same grammar errors and recommendations that she sees.
Unfortunately, Caitlin, there is no way to do that. The reason is because the grammar checker settings are not, by design, stored with a document. The reason is because if you have two editors (I'll refer to them as Mary and Tom), Mary will have different editing preferences than Tom. She may follow a style guide in her work that Tom doesn't follow in his. Over time, the grammar settings on her system become "tailored" to how she does her editing, and when she opens a new document, she will want those settings applied to the document.
If grammar settings were stored with the document itself, however, then Mary would not be able to count on her editorial preferences being displayed by either the grammar or spell checker; the preferences would be those of a different person—probably the one who created the document.
The only feasible workaround would be to take screen shots of the document, open in Word on your system. These screen shots could then be shared with others to show what you are seeing on your system.
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2015-06-14 20:47:28
Stuart Whitmore
Using your example, it makes sense for Mary to have her preferences used for NEW documents she creates. However, preserving the preferences of the creator of an existing document that she opens to edit is EXACTLY how it should work -- that would not be a problem at all. It is common that the document creator is also the document owner, and it should be a non-trivial, manual task to ignore the document owner's preferences. Ignoring those preferences by default (and making it impossible to enforce them) may be by design, but if so it is just one of countless bad design decisions in Microsoft software.
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