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:

Installation method - My Best Guess 

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.

Frontpage is no good at installing proofing tools.  Let the infinitely better Microsoft Word installer do it.

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.

Afterthought

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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