If your users are using Outlook and they are complaining about their spell checker not working then there may be more than a couple of ways to fix this.

Sometimes the spell checker seems to stop working after a new version of Office 2007 has been installed. The problem will show up when your user attempts to run the spell checker in either MS Word or Outlook. One of the situations that shows the problem is when your user highlights some text, and runs spell checker, then they get a message back stating that the “…spelling and grammar check is complete.” But none of their spelling errors were corrected.

You can try having them turn off “Detect language automatically”.  This will sometimes fix the problem.

Knowing how Outlook spell checker works can be useful. In Office 2007, Outlook doesn’t use MS Word as its editor.  Instead, Outlook has its own abridged version of Word embedded in a .dll file. This makes Outlook independent of MS Word. But while the spelling and grammar functions (proofing libraries) are shared, the user’s custom dictionaries are not shared. So any spellings that get added to the Word dictionary have to be added separately to the Outlook dictionary.

Continue reading Errors with Outlook and Spell Checker