Excel Spell Check

Spell Check in Excel (Table of Contents)

• Spell Check in Excel
• Uses of Spell Check in Excel?
• Examples of Spell check in Excel
• Features of Spell Check in Excel Dialogue Box

Spell Check in Excel

Spell check is one of the important checks that should be done in Excel. However, it is often ignored as most of the Excel users deals more in numbers as compared to texts. But it is an important tool while we are creating any dataset having text values stored in cells of a workbook. Imagine you have the dataset, you have to send to your customer/client, and they notice a large number of typos in it, all your hard work will go into vain. No matter how much you have worked on their data analysis and wasted your whole week on it. So, don’t ignore it just like that. I am going to explain all the features of Spell check and it’s all features with a small example.

Uses of Spell Check in Excel

Spell Check is used to identify spelling errors, typing errors or any kind of duplicate words (I will explain it with an example) in Excel. It may be a useful tool when you are using some texts repetitively in Excel. Although, many of us play with numbers in Excel spell check plays a crucial role when we are creating some reports and datasets which may have texts. So, nobody will want to see any kind of errors in it, or you don’t want to upset your managers/bosses by these kinds of mistakes

Examples of Spell Check in Excel

• In the below screenshot, I have the conversation between 2 guys saved in Excel. Don’t go with the content, it’s purely to make you understand better.

Screenshot 1

• In Screenshot 1, you can see there are a lot of typing errors and spelling mistakes.

• To run spell check in this particular workbook, you must activate the cells where you want to check spelling or typing errors and go to “REVIEW” tab in Excel ribbon and there you will find spell check option.

• Shortcut to run spell check is simply pressing “F7” button from your keyboard after activating the cells/worksheet.

Screenshot 2

• In the above Screenshot 2, you can notice that I have selected the A1 cell and the spell check option in the review tab.

• Key Point: If you select cell A1, it will go through all the cells horizontally i.e. all columns of the first row, then moves to the second row and check all the column cells in the second row (from left to right) and then move to the third row and so on.
• After going on to the last cell where any value is stored and it identifies any spelling error, a spelling dialogue box will be displayed.
• if you want to start spell check from somewhere else, let’s take an example, cell D5, it will simply go through all cells of Row 5 and then rows below it and when done will all rows after D5, it will ask you, “if you want to continue checking at the beginning of the sheet?”. Some dialogue box like below Screenshot will appear. If you select yes, it will check remaining cells (A1 to D5 in our case) and shows suggestion. To make you understand better, I have selected D5 cell and pressed F7 now it will check all the cells after it, and give spelling correction suggestions & after it will ask to check remaining cells or not and work accordingly. For your better understanding please go through below Screenshots.

Screenshot 3

• Pressed F7 after activating B13 cell, now spell check dialogue box will appear with correction suggestions.

Screenshot 4

• Results of the cell B13 correction through Spell Check is mentioned in the screenshot

Screenshot 5

• After done with the last cell with correction(C13), it has asked to check from the beginning of sheet. As discussed above.

Features of Spell Check in Excel Dialog Box

• You might have noticed in above screenshots that there are many options available in spell check. Let us discuss them one by one.
  1. Ignore Once: If there is an error according to Excel, but you want to keep that text like that only, you must click this and excel will ignore this error for once.
  2. Ignore all: If you want to ignore all the instances of that particular word in the given workbook, you can click this option.
  3. Add to Dictionary: If there is an error in any text, but it is the word to be used frequently in future as well (maybe any name or abbreviation, etc.) then you can add it to the dictionary. Any word added to Excel’s Dictionary will not be detected as an error in future in any workbook. It will become part of the dictionary and a list of acceptable words.
  4. Change: you can use it when you want to change a word according to suggestions, and it will change it according to the selected suggested word. (You can see in Screenshot 3, words suggested for text in cell C5.)
  5. Change all: It will replace all the instances of that word in a worksheet according to selected suggestion.
  6. Autocorrect: If you go with this option, it will autocorrect the word with selected suggestion and it will be added to autocorrect list viz every time you typed that word it will be automatically corrected according to selected suggestion.
  7. Dictionary Language: We can change the dictionary used in Excel.
  8. Options: Used to change the default settings of the Excel (discussed later in this guide) and it will open an option box where you can make changes accordingly.
• Now I chose to continue spell check from the beginning of the sheet. And chose options accordingly. All spell checks are done.

Screenshot 6

• In above Screenshot 6, you might have noticed that there are still some spelling errors in the worksheet but still, Excel is not detecting the errors. Have you noticed? If yes, Excellent!! It has brought us to notice the default settings of the Spell check, and they are:
  1. It ignores all errors in the upper case. For e.g. words “AAM” and “FIINE” in cells C4 & D4 respectively are not marked as an error.
  2. All words with numbers in it will be ignored too. (cell B12 “newww123”)
  3. It also ignores all internet address and file addresses. (D7 & B12)
•  If you want to change default settings in Spell check dialogue box you need to go to the file then you to click on the option to get the excel options menu as shown below

By clicking the option You will get the Excel option Menu like this as shown below

Then you have to click on the proofing to change default settings in Spell check dialogue box.

Screenshot 7

• Another important feature to note here is Spell check doesn’t ignore repeated words. You can identify it by comparing Screenshot 1 and Screenshot 6 carefully.

Cell F4 has “how are you?” and spell check has detected it. I have deleted it with delete option it which only appears when we have any kind of repetitions in Excel.

Things to Remember

• Spell check is used to identify spelling errors in Excel.
• You can ignore, change, autocorrect or add to the dictionary all detected errors according to your requirement.
• It doesn’t detect errors in words written in uppercase or have numbers in it.
• It ignores all file and internet addresses.
• It detects the repetition of words.

You can download the Spell Check Excel template here  –

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