Surpressing the Spell Checker with a Style

Enough of the PDF nonsense...it's time to get back to styles. We're about half way through what you can do with a style.

Remember that we are making global changes. When you make global changes, you access the dialogs by right-clicking a style in the Styles (or Styles and Formatting) pane to display a pop-up. Select the Modify option to display the Modify Styles dialog. You can then click the Format button for a list options. Tonight, we're going to look at the Language option.

You've seen this dialog before in the post about suppressing the spell checker. In most instances, you're going to accept the default language. The item of interest on this dialog is the Do not check spelling or grammar option.

Making a choice here is tricky but make the right choice and you have a helpful style.

If you are modifying a paragraph style--a style that you apply to an entire paragraph, do not select the Do not check spelling or grammar option, because every place that you apply the style will get skipped by the spell checker. Not a good thing unless you have supreme confidence in your spelling.

If you are modifying a character style--a style that you apply to a few characters like a family name or place name, you may want to consider selecting the Do not check spelling or grammar option. When you apply the style to an oddly spelled family name or place name, not only do you get the spiffy formatting built into the character style but you also automatically suppress the spell checker. If you're careful about the spelling of the family or place name, using this option as part of a character style is another way to avoid being annoyed by the spell checker getting hung up on these types of names.

We're almost through all of the global changes via Modify Style/Format selections. After we've gone through all of the global changes, we'll start looking at the local changes, which are frequently used to tweak text on a page mostly to make it fit on the page better.

So bear with me. We don't have far to go. After we look at local changes, we'll talk about building templates.

Other Types of Styles

Sorry for the break. Like almost everybody I know in Florida, I'm having sinus issues. But it's time to get started again. Let's see, where was I...heading styles.

I've only spoken about heading styles so far. While looking for the heading styles, you should have noticed there are several other styles in any lists that you display. These styles are used to format text to present it in a certain fashion. That is, a style has a preselected font (type face), font size, spacing before and after the paragraph, and any number of other attributes like being indented from a margin. You need to experiment with these styles to learn to use them.

Grand Experiment
1. Open Word and the Blank document template appears automatically.
2. Type a few short paragraphs.
3. Open the list of styles. (See earlier posts for styles.)
4. Notice that the Normal style is selected automatically.
5. Click in a paragraph and pick another style. For example, click the paragraph style Quote or Intense Quote. The presentation of the paragraph changes based on your style selection.

Style lists can contain a number of different types of styles. In Word 2010, the Blank document template style list is limited to two types: paragraph style and character style. Notice that a few in the list below are a combination of both.

Understanding that a paragraph style changes a paragraph and a character style changes just a few selected words in a paragraph is a distinction that you need to internalize.

Another Grand Experiment
1. In a different paragraph, use your cursor to select a few words.
2. Click the Strong character style. Word applies bold to the selected text.

Now comes the interesting part for a genealogist. While the use of the paragraph styles can save you lots of button pressing to format text, the character styles are downright convenient. Here's how...

I like to format all of my family names as bold in small caps so that they stand out in running text. I format my place names as bold and italic. I don't want to make all of these changes each time I add a family name or place name to my document. So, I add the character styles Name and Place. When I add a name to my document, I use my cursor to select the text and apply Name or Place depending on the name. Word completes the formatting for me.

This post is getting long and I've thrown out a lot of ideas for you to process. So I'm going to stop here for tonight. In my next post, I'll give you the exact steps for creating the Name and Place styles.

Styles are a huge topic so we're going to be talking about them for awhile. However, there is one item for note left for this post. Word 2003 users get a complete list of styles automatically. Word 2007 and 2010 users have to hunt for them.

Displaying All Styles in Word 2007 or 2010
1. Look at the bottom of the Styles pane. (See graphic above.)
2. Click the Options... link. The Style Pane Options dialog appears.
3. In the Select styles to show box, select All styles from the drop-down list.
4. Click OK, and then look at your styles list. You'll find many more pre-defined styles.