The other day, I amazed and astounded my husband, the nerd, with this cool tip. It’s not easy to impress the nerd, so I figured I should share this one.
As most people know, I work on a lot of long technical tomes that are produced in Microsoft Word. Here’s a little known fact: you can tell Word not to spell check certain parts of your document. At first you might wonder why that’s a good idea, but this feature is actually extremely useful if you have something like programming code examples in your large technical document. Laboriously, spell checking pages of code and clicking the Ignore button 7,000 times is no fun.
Although it’s not exactly intuitive, turning off spell checking for a particular passage of text is actually found in the Language settings. You can tell Word that text is in a foreign language and then it can use an alternate dictionary to spell check it. Or not check it at all.
So in this case, you could highlight your piece of programming code and choose Tools|Language|Set Language. In the Language dialog box, you don’t change the language (i.e. you leave it set to English), but you click to add a checkmark next to "Do not check spelling or grammar."
Now here’s the part that the resident nerd thought was really cool. If you use styles, you can set this no proofing language attribute within the style. Because all programming code in a book should look the same, the smart Word user creates a style to format it. Then in the Style dialog box for your Code style, click Modify, then Format, and then Language. You see the same Language dialog box and you can tell Word "Do not check spelling or grammar" for all your programming code with one quick click.