Contextual Spelling in MS Word 2007
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
Robert Iakobashvili, Ph.D.
Ghotit
Original post here: Contextual Spelling of Word 2007
MS-Word 2007 for Windows and MS-Word 2008 for Macintosh so-called “contextual spelling” was introduced with a great enthusiasm as expressed e.g. here.
Office 2007 for Windows (2008 for Mac) automatically activates “contextual spelling”, if a computer has at least 1 GB of memory, otherwise, you can configure it manually: Enable Contextual spelling in Microsoft Word 2007
You may teach your students to pay attention to the words underlined by a blue line, which Office-2007 is suspecting to be out-of-context / misused / confused, whereas the right click mouse menu contains some correction candidates.
Spelling capabilities of about all of the existing spellers, tools, word-processors, etc have been studied by Dr. Pedler in the link below and the citations inside, and found to be not of a much assistance for people with dyslexia: Computer Correction of Real-word Spelling Errors in Dyslexic Text
Since the research of Dr. Pedler does not cover MS-Word-2007 with contextual spelling capabilities, we made a small comparison testing among Word-2003, Word-2007 and Ghotit web-site speller. Still, this is not a comprehensive research using a big corpus.
Some brief conclusions are that Word-2007 is better than Word-2003 due to contextual spelling, where there is still remains a large room for improvements.