While I have faced this problem many times, it was only recently that I got ticked off by it a bit too much. The problem? If you are writing a document, and you have non-English things such as Code snippets, or foreign language phrases, etc. in it, you will end up with a lot of red and green squiggly lines in your document. See the image to understand what I mean:
Not only do these spell and grammar checks become irritating, sometimes they can detract you from observing other errors in your document. So, I asked myself the questions, can I turn off spell and grammar check for certain parts of the document? It turns out that I can.
Well, in an ideal world, I would simply highlight the area where I want to turn off the spell and grammar check, click a button and be done. The true solution is almost as simple, but you have to do a bit of work to set it up first.
Let me continue with my example of code in document being the most obvious target for this type of thing (at least for me). I often like to have code snippets in the document as a different font (as do most people), and towards that, I normally setup a quick style (Word 2007, Word 2010) called “Code” which allows me to quickly setup the desired font, indentation, and size for any part of the document that is a code snippet. (Here’s a quick Microsoft link for “creating a new quick style” – if you Google/Bing, you should get much more help there).
So, basically, I already have a way of marking parts of the document where I don’t want to have any grammar or spell check (all these parts are formatted under the Style “Code”). I can leverage the Quick Style feature to achieve what I need – I can tell a Style that I don’t want to check grammar and spelling for any text that is formatted as that style.
Here’s how. First go to the style and open the “Modify…” dialog box:
Now, click on the “Format” button and choose “Language…”:
Now, simply check the “Do not check spelling or grammar” option, press OK, and then OK to confirm.
That’s it. Now, whenever I format any text as “Code”, it doesn’t get checked for spelling or grammar.
Peace of mind.