The North Orange County Computer Club is helping The Gadgetress tackle the multitude of readers cries for help. NOCCC group has experts in all sorts of computer topics. The club, which meets monthly on various topics, has been in existence since 1976. Visit the club’s site at noccc.org.

Question: I lost the spell-check feature in English ever since I upgraded to Office 2007 Pro. This was a nice feature I have been using for years. Now, when I use spell-check all my English words are flagged as misspelled and it gives me multiple choices with French words. Spell-check works fine with Word 2007. How can I retrieve the Thesaurus? I am neither ready nor willing to write my messages in French. I tried to change the settings to no avail.I use Windows XP Pro, Outlook Express 6, and Office 2007 Pro.

Thank you very much, or shall I type Merci?

NOCC: My best guess about the cause of your problem is in the default settings in your Word program. When you start a new document in Word, a blank document faces you. Even though there are no words in that document, there are many settings in the master “Normal.dotm” template, which tells Word how your document will look when you start typing.

What I am referring to are the settings for things like margins, type and size of fonts, paragraph justification and spacing, etc. When you create a document, you can modify each setting to your satisfaction. When you save a document, those settings are saved with it. However, the next time you start a new document, the “default settings” are with you again. If you made a change as to which spelling dictionary you wanted to use in a prior document, that change will not be present in the new document – which is based on the “Normal.dotm” template.

The default settings do not use the French dictionary as the primary spell-check dictionary. The “Normal.dotm” template must have been inadvertently modified. It might have happened in the upgrade process.

There are also times when exiting Word you will be asked whether you want to save changes to “Normal.dotm” (in Word 2003 it is “Normal.dot”). If you say “Yes,” then whatever changes were made to the default will show up every time you begin a new document.

There is an easy fix to your problem. You need to locate the “Normal.dotm” file on your computer. To do this, right-click on the “Start” button, then click on “Explore.” Click on the “Search” button.

Next, click on “All files and folders” and then type “Normal.dotm” in the search window. In the “Look In” menu, click on the arrow at the right and select “Local Disk (c:).” Finally, click the “Search” button.

If you have several drives, then you might also want to search them. When you locate the file, right-click on it and select “Open Containing Folder.” When you see the file, right-click on it and then choose “rename.” Change the name to “Normal OLD.dotm.” This accomplishes two things. It saves your old file, in case you find that you had some other changes in there that you really need. The second thing that it does is eliminate the “Normat.dotm” file from the listing because it was renamed.

Don’t worry, the next time that you run Word the “Norman.dotm,” file will be rebuilt with Word’s default settings. This should get rid of the incorrect association to the French dictionary.

NOCCC will meet on April 6th at Chapman University in the city of Orange. Steve Gibson, Leo Laporte’s co-host on Security Now, will be the speaker at the main meeting in Irvine Hall at 2:00 PM. He will talk about the dangers and importance of hard disk drive encryption. Guests are welcome. Visit www.noccc.org for more information.

~ Elise M. Edgell, NOCCC past president

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Stump the PC Club. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.