Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

chapter 2: editing in word 93

nary doesn’t go away forever. It remains in the Library→Preferences→Microsoft

folder (in your Home folder), or wherever you stored it on your Mac’s hard drive. To

return it to the Custom Dictionaries dialog box, click Add and choose it in the Add

Dictionary dialog box.

Foreign language dictionaries

If your new dictionary is in a foreign language, there’s an extra step. After creating

the new custom dictionary, as described above, select the new foreign dictionary in

the Custom Dictionaries dialog box. Then choose the appropriate language from

the Language pop-up menu. Now Word will know to apply the correct spelling rules

for that language.

Choosing custom dictionaries before spell-checking

From now on, before you check spelling, you can specify which custom dictionaries

you want Word to consider as it pores over your document. To do so, choose

Wor d→Preferences→Spelling and Grammar panel, and then choose a custom dic-

tionary from the pop-up menu.

Exclude dictionaries

As noted earlier, you can’t edit the built-in Word dictionary. The previous discus-

sions guide you through adding words to Word’s spelling wisdom—but how do you

delete a word from the built-in dictionary? After all, as noted above, the main dictio-

nary is a hermetically sealed, specially encoded, untouchable entity that you can’t

edit using any tool known to man.

The answer: by creating an exclude dictionar ...