The Office spell checker is great for catching those typos and other errors that AutoCorrect misses.

Good business writing must be clear and readable, and the spell checker ensures that spelling mistakes don’t mar your prose. (This is particularly crucial for documents you send outside of the company—say, to clients and potential customers— because spelling gaffes can quickly tarnish your or your company’s reputation.)

However, the spell checker is only as useful as it is accurate. The built-in dictionary is massive with hundreds of thousands of words, Fortune 1000 company names, ethnic names, somewhat new coinages (such as outsourcing), computer terms, country names, and more.

However, you probably still see that squiggly red line under a lot of words that you use every day. Your goal should be to minimize or even eliminate these “false positives” so that the spell checker flags only actual misspellings.

One way to do that is to add words to the spell checker’s default custom dictionary, which is a text file called CUSTOM.DIC, located in the following folder:

%UserProfile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\UProof

You add words to the dictionary by right-clicking a word flagged by the spell checker and then clicking Add to Dictionary. The spell checker then inserts the unknown word into this dictionary. That works, but what if you have many words that you want to add?

To handle a large list of new words, you need to create your own custom dictionary. This involves two main steps: creating the dictionary and telling the spell checker about it. Here are the steps to follow to create the custom dictionary:

1. Launch a text editor such as Notepad (choose Start, All Programs, Accessories, Notepad).
2. Choose File, Save, and then save the text file as follows:
• Be sure to save the file in the UProof folder mentioned earlier.
• Give the filename the .dic extension.
3. For each word you want to include in the custom dictionary, type the word and then press Enter.
4. Save your work and close the text editor.

Now follow these steps to tell the spell checker about your custom dictionary:

1. Choose Office, Word Options and then click Proofing.
2. Click Custom Dictionaries to open the Custom Dictionaries dialog box.
3. Click Add to open the Add Custom Dictionary dialog box.
4. Click the text file you created and then click Open.
5. Click OK and then click OK again in the Word Options dialog box.

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