MS Word - Disappearing Thesaurus/Dictionary

[tkingdoll]

Hi folks,

I'm rewriting a document for a client and was working from the MS Word doc they emailed to me.

On some of the pages, the thesaurus and dictionary disappears. They will be there for the top half of the page, underlining words in red and green in that annoying way, and opening if I click Tools>check spelling or Language>Thesaurus, or right-clicking on a word for the Synonyms menu.

But, on the other half of the same page, none of those options apply. The Synonym option is not on the right-click menu, the red and green underlines don't appear even if I type "frstga;dehgs;jhgd" and if I choose Thesaurus from the Tools menu, nothing happens. Literally, nothing at all. No error message, nowt.

However, if I choose Tools>check spelling, I do get an error message. It reads:

Word cannot find the grammar file msgr??32.dl for .

and then

Word cannot find the spelling file MSSpell.dll or mssp32.dll for .

And then it jumps to another part of the doc (presumably the next part where the dictionary works) and spellchecks it!

So at present I have random chunks of pages that don't have those tools. Weird!

I've copied the entire document into a new doc, and that doesn't fix it. I haven't yet tried pasting it unformatted because it's 40 pages and that's a lot of wasted time re-formatting if there's a quick solution from one of you guys .

Wtf is going on? Any ideas? It's driving me nuts. Tomorrow I'll try re-installing Word but I'd like to know why it's doing this.

Yours, confused in Birmingham

 

[empeake]

Probably some parts of the text have been set up with a language that you don't have. Try this:

Edit --> Select All
Tools --> Language --> Set Language
Choose your language from the list, and make sure the two checkboxes at the bottom are unchecked. Then click on OK.
Press F7 to check the spelling and see if it works.

 

[tkingdoll]

OK, now it's really weird. I did that, and it's reactived part of the thesaurus (it now underlines in green, and if I pick Thesaurus from the Tools menu it opens fine) but the synonyms option is still not there when I right-click.

The dictionary is back though. Thank you! Spellcheck is not vital as I proofread a zillion times, but it saves a bit of time with obvious stuff.

Thinking along the language lines, I looked at the right-click menu, and saw that there is a translate option. Here's another weird thing: if I pick Translate for words in the paragraphs that do not have the Synonyms menu, it opens the Translate window. If I choose it for words in paragraphs that DO have the Synonyms menu, it tells me that the Translate feature is not installed.

???!

 

[tkingdoll]

Forget everything! I fixed it.

I noticed that for some reason the body text of the paragraphs that didn't have the synonyms menu was set as a Header in the Style menu. I changed it to a regular body style and now it's fine.

New lesson: ask clients to send unforamatted plain text documents from now on.

 

[kevin]

i hate word

and for more off topic comments, i went to your SeeMyDinner site (hoping it was pre-eaten pictures....) you might enjoy this site if you don't already know about it:

http://www.cookingforengineers.com/

 

[tkingdoll]

i hate word

and for more off topic comments, i went to your SeeMyDinner site (hoping it was pre-eaten pictures....) you might enjoy this site if you don't already know about it:

http://www.cookingforengineers.com/

Cool link, thanks! I'll add it to my blogroll.

Beluga caviar is banned in the US? That sucks.

I don't mind Word as long as I've had complete control of the document from the start. Faffing about with someone else's formatting is a nightmare though. Ugh.

 

[kevin]

Beluga caviar is banned in the US? That sucks.

I didn't know that. Apparently the beluga is an endangered species, although I believe some might say making it illegal creates a blackmarket that might actually cause more problems. I think a similar thing happened in ivory markets until their was a worldwide ban on all ivory sales.