Typos have no place in professional business documents, whether delivered electronically or in hard copy form. You always want to put your best foot forward and make sure that your files are attractive, clear and easy to follow, and typo free.

By default, many of the Office applications quietly check your spelling for you as you type. If you see a telltale red squiggle appear underneath a word, that means that the application thinks you’ve misspelled the word—according to the application’s own dictionary, anyway. If you see a wavy red underline underneath a word, right-click the word. As shown in Figure 3-25, you can then click a correction in the shortcut menu that appears to replace the typo with the correction, or click Add to Dictionary so that the word is no longer flagged as a misspelling.

If you’ve finished creating the document and have moved on to the fine-tuning stage, you should always run a complete spell check to catch any typos that you may have missed earlier. Use these steps to run the check, and use the most common options for dealing with potential misspellings:

1. Press Ctrl+Home. This step moves to the beginning of the document so that the spell checking operation will start from there.
2. Click the Review tab on the Ribbon.
3. Click Spelling & Grammar (Word) or Spelling (other apps) in the Proofing Group. The Spelling dialog box appears with the first potential misspelling highlighted, as shown in Figure 3-26. Some applications enable you to start a spelling check simply by pressing F7.
4. Click a button to tell the spelling check how to proceed:
   1. Ignore: Skips only the currently found instance of the suspected word without replacing it.
   2. Ignore All: Skips all instances of the suspected word without replacing it.
   3. Change: Replaces only the currently found instance of the suspected word with the current selection in the Suggestions list. (Click another suggestion before clicking this button, if needed.)
   4. Change All: Replaces all instances of the suspected word with the current selection in the Suggestions list. (Click another suggestion before clicking this button, if needed.)
   5. Add: Adds the suspected word to the dictionary so that it will be skipped in future spelling checks.
      
5. Repeat Step 4 as needed to proceed through the spelling check.
6. Click OK in the message that tells you that the spelling check has been completed.

It’s critical to proofread your files even after spell checking. Because no spelling checker can pick up on every wrong word choice—such as when you use “then” instead of “than” or “their” instead of “there,” you still need to apply your own intelligence in perfecting your documents.

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