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Getting spell check to work in Outlook Express...

Posted By : of Data Doctors on May 7, 2001

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I have several computers that I work with between my office and home systems and I use Outlook Express on all of them but the spell check option is grayed out on one of them. How do I activate the spell checker in Outlook Express?

-Roy

This question was answered on May 7, 2001. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.


Checking spelling is just one of several very important e-mail “netiquette” rules that we should all be following before sending out a message (A basic e-mail netiquette guide is posted at: <a href="http://computerproblems.com/netiquette.htm"><font color="#003399">computerproblems.com/netiquette.htm</font></a>)

When it comes to spell checking in Outlook Express, Microsoft’s free e-mail program, it is actually dependant on the spell check engine in one of the many other Microsoft products They include (but are not limited to): Office 95/97/2000, Word, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint and even Access.

If you don’t have one of these installed or installed them without the spell check option, you won’t be able to use the “Spelling” option under the Tools menu or the “F7” keyboard shortcut These options will be “grayed out” meaning that they are not available.

If you do have one of the afore mentioned products but are unable to use the spell check feature in Outlook Express, you may have an incompatible mix or you may need to reinstall the spell check option for the qualifying program

If you are using Outlook Express version 4.x and install Office 2000 or any of the latest Office programs like Word 2000, you will need to upgrade to Outlook Express version 5.x in order for them to work together.

If you have the most current version of both, it may mean that the “pointer” that tells Outlook Express where to go for the spell check engine is no longer in place The easiest way to repair this is to do a complete re-install of the qualifying product (Office, Word, Excel, etc.) from the original CD

If you are somewhat technical, you can remove and re-install just the spell check component from the original CD by choosing the “Custom” option during the installation routine This will recreate the registry key that is needed for Outlook Express to have spell check.

If you are comfortable with the Windows Registry, you can manually edit it by looking for the following entry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools

and making sure that the value under the “SharedFilesDir” entry is

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\ Make sure the trailing “\” is included or the pointer does not work properly DO NOT attempt this fix if you are not familiar with the hazards of working within the system registry files!

If all of these technical options are mind numbing, you may want to switch to another free e-mail program that has built in spell checking, such as Eudora 5.1 (<a href="http://www.eudora.com" target="_blank"><font color="#003399">www.eudora.com</font></a>).

Or you may want to opt for one of the many free or low cost spell check programs that will work with just about any e-mail client, word processor, spreadsheet or browser Programs like Fornada’s QuickSpell (<a href="http://www.fornada.com" target="_blank"><font color="#003399">www.fornada.com</font></a>) can work with most any application by “floating” around them and checking highlighted text when you so desire.

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of Data Doctors on May 7, 2001

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