At the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans on 13 July 2009, we announced the launch of the Office 2010 Technical Preview. This technical preview can now be downloaded by thousands of customers. You can discover the innovations on the Office 2010 blog and watch really cool videos on www.microsoft...

A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced an initiative targeting the Hispanic community , with special offers for Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office 2007 Language Pack in Spanish . It may be worth pointing out that the Spanish proofing tools in Office 2007 include a brand-new context-sensitive...

A few days ago, I discovered an analysis of our Office 2007 contextual speller carried out by Prof. Graeme Hirst, from the University of Toronto: An Evaluation of the Contextual Spelling Checker of Microsoft Office Word 2007 . We have discussed this new context-sensitive speller on several occasions...

The other day, I was discussing a number of suggestions to improve Office’s spell-checker . A customer was suggesting we should allow users to delete individual items from Word’s spell-checker lexicon. This feature is already available, in fact: if you want to specify a preferred spelling for a word...

A few days ago, James wrote about the articles the Seattle Times published about our Natural Language Group and the Office spell-checkers . One of these articles was encouraging the Seattle Times readers to suggest improvements ( What words would you add to the Microsoft spell-checker? ). It is very...

For opening day this year, my beloved Chicago Cubs unveiled a statue of the immortal Ernie Banks . On its pedestal was engraved the catchphrase that made famous his enthusiasm for the game of baseball: “Let’s Play Two”. Except that the sculptor forgot one little detail, as reported by the Chicago Tribune...

During my vacation in December 2007, I had a chance to visit a friend of mine who works for the United Nations in Bangkok. On a Friday evening right before Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's visit to the UN Bangkok office, I chatted with his colleagues in the UN building over beer and wine. Many of...

Laurie asked us via the Email/Contact link: I was always under the impression that the Contextual Spell Checker only works if your language is set to English (US) rather than English (UK). However, I have recently seen the blue squiggly lines appear for English (UK). Can you confirm whether this has...

Thanks to Mike Calcagno for pointing this out.... See page 2 with the paragraph that starts with "Other improvements." http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/18/technology/18pogue.html?8dpc -- Jay Waltmunson (Program Manager)

Some lovely words about the contextual spellchecker from Walter Mossberg's review of Office 2007 in today's Wall Street Journal online. To quote: There are other nice additions. In Word, Outlook and PowerPoint, there is now contextual spell checking, which points to a wrong word, even if the spelling...

It’s interesting to see how useful the new Contextual Speller feature in Office 2007 can be. If Office 2007 had been used to write the news release about the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 issued yesterday by Microsoft over the PR Newswire, the following correction, which you can read here , would not...

Jonathan & Margaret over on the Word blog have some nice words about the contextual spellchecker . They mention a well-known (but anonymous) poem, “Ode to My Spell Checker”--just the sort of thing the contextual spellchecker ought to handle, you might think? Well, let's take a look: Whoops...

Contextual spelling is turned on by default if your machine has at least 1 GB of RAM; however, it can still work just fine in the background with less RAM. So, how do you turn it on if it's not already on? First, click on the Office button in the upper left corner of the window from which a dialog...