Using the Proofing Tools in FrontPage2000
I do a fair bit of scanning articles in foreign languages. To help the correcting process, I got the proofing tools. Since I do all my web pages in Frontpage (using it just as a WYSIWYG editor) I expected them to work with FrontPage 2000.
Frankly they doesn't work very well. Installing them just doesn't work reliably at all. Some very nasty things can happen, and in fact you can corrupt your Office setup in such a way that you will not be able to use the foreign-language spell-checking at all, whatever you do. In the end I had to reinstall Windows - very unpleasant.
However I have a clue, which has worked for me, so I offer it to you:
1. Install Microsoft Office 2000.
2. Install Microsoft Frontpage 2000
3. Install Microsoft Office 2000 Proofing Tools (not that it will make a lot of difference).
4. If you do all this, Frontpage pretends to take no notice. But here's the clever bit.
Write your Spanish/Italian in Frontpage and save it.
Now do Tools|Page Options|Set Default Spelling Language to 'Italian (Standard)' or whatever.
Now do Tools|Spelling. It will tell you 'Microsoft Frontpage can't check the spelling in this document. This feature is not currently installed. Would you like to install it now?' SAY NO!!!
Frontpage is no good at installing proofing tools. Let the infinitely better Microsoft Word installer do it.
Select your text (which has the language set, remember) in Frontpage, and copy and paste it into a brand new Word document. Don't bother to save it.
Now do Tools|Spelling and Grammar. You'll get the same error: 'Microsoft Word can't check the spelling in this document. This feature is not currently installed. Would you like to install it now?' SAY YES.
When you do this, have both the MS Office 2000 and the Proofing tools CD's nearby.
First it will tell you it is configuring MS Office Pro. It will usually demand the CD for this. When I installed 'French (Standard)' this was all it wanted.
Then it will give you the very same error again! 'Microsoft Word can't check the spelling in this document. This feature is not currently installed. Would you like to install it now?' SAY YES.
Now it will tell you it is configuring Proofing tools, and will prompt for these.
I found that for Spanish it did both, for Italian it only wanted the Proofing disk, and for French only the Office CD. Why? Who knows?
Once one or both of these steps have run, the dialog box for spell-checking will pop-up with the right words - you've got it installed OK for words!
5. Now switch back to your original Frontpage session, and repeat the Tools|Spelling. It will now work.
Keep it simple, chaps. It all went badly wrong for me when I tried to set the language to Finnish, so that no words were recognised and it would search the user dictionary custom.dic (full of Latin, as it happened). My PC was never the same again...
Last updated 30th March, 2001.
This page has been online since 30th December 2000.
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