Editors know that English spelling preferences differ from the Americas to Europe, and even differ within the Americas. MS Word is ready to help, with at least three options for English spellcheck dictionaries in the Language settings.
Continue reading The Many Englishes of MS WordTag Archives: preferences
Track Changes Inline or in Balloons
The book and its tutorial videos go into options for seeing Tracked Changes in quite a bit of detail, so here we’ll just compare seeing changes in balloons vs seeing them inline. We’re also sticking with the defaults for colour, underlining, etc. though it’s almost all customizable. (Except for specifying which reviewer is shown in which colour; that’s impossible.)
Continue reading Track Changes Inline or in BalloonsMake Comments Appear On the Left in Word
Comments posted in a Word document appear on the right, by default, in a region called the Markup Area. But you can have it your way: move those comment balloons to the left, if you want!
Continue reading Make Comments Appear On the Left in WordStop the Annoying Formatting Pop-Up When Pasting in Word

That tiny clipboard icon that pops up whenever you paste something into a Word file can get pretty annoying. It obscures the text and gets clicked inadvertently. It’s usually just technology getting in the way.
Here is how to turn it off in Word 365/2019. Windows instructions follow the Mac instructions. The process hasn’t changed much since 2003.
Continue reading Stop the Annoying Formatting Pop-Up When Pasting in WordA Guide to Word’s Squiggles
Into every Word file, a few squiggles must fall.

In the 2019 release that is a snapshot of Word 365, the grammar and spelling tools are grouped together in a feature Microsoft has called the Editor. On screen, Word flags errors by underlining them. The underlining it uses mean the following:
- red squiggle = misspelled
- blue dots = formatting error
- blue double straight = word choice or grammar error
The flagging of homonyms has improved, as you can see in the left-hand figure, but Word still misses a lot of grammar errors and some of the formatting errors — even when it has flagged those exact errors elsewhere. The errors shown in the screen grabs below are particularly bad, but Word even misses errors they used as illustrations in Word’s own help files.
Word flagged the yellow spelling and grammar errors but missed all the blue ones. With all grammar options turned off, Word still flags the homonym.
Turning On Grammar & Spelling Display
- On a Mac, go to Word > Preferences > Spelling & Grammar.
- Windows users, click Options on the File menu, then select Proofing. In the area headed “When correcting spelling and grammar in Word,” click the Settings… button.

Turning Off Grammar & Spelling Display
You can turn off grammar checking, and you can deselect a lot of the checks, but even if you turn off the display of spelling errors, homonyms will still be flagged. (Right figure, top.)
While many editors turn off the grammar checker because Word’s advice is misguided more often than not, the blue “wrong word” checker cannot be turned off.
To get rid of the flags, select “Check Document” or “Recheck Document” in the spelling & grammar settings after deselecting “Mark grammar errors as you type” and “Check grammar with spelling.”

