Hello again and welcome back to our course on PowerPoint 2013.
In this section, we’re going to look at spell checking.
Although it probably is more accurate to say we’re going to look at spell checking and
grammar checking because optionally, as well as checking the spelling in your presentation,
PowerPoint 2013 can check your grammar as well.
For the vast majority of people who learn how to use PowerPoint 2013, the reason for
doing so is to make presentations and when you’re making a presentation, I really don’t
think you want to see spelling errors or grammar errors on the screen.
You don’t want your audience to look at work, you may have spent hours and hours on
and think it’s a pretty shoddy piece of work because you haven’t even checked that
the words are spelled correctly.
So I believe it’s very important to build in spell checking and optionally grammar checking
into the production process you have for your presentations.
Now there are basically two approaches, although one might argue there are actually three.
But let’s say there are two approaches to checking spelling and grammar.
One approach is to have PowerPoint 2013 check it for you as you work, so as you’re actually
entering text into your presentations, you can get PowerPoint 2013 to tell you if you’ve
made any spelling mistakes or whether you’ve made any grammar mistakes or to be slightly
more accurate, whether it thinks you have, because sometimes what it thinks is an error
is not an error.
The second approach is not to have it check it as you go along but for you either at the
end of your work or periodically during your work to run what is effectively a manual check
of spelling and grammar in your presentation.
And we’re going to look at both of those approaches in this section.
Now one of the tabs on the Ribbon has some particular significance when you’re proofing.
I just want to quickly visit that now and that’s the Review tab because on the Review
tab there are two very important commands.
One of them is right at the left in the Proofing Group and that’s the Spell Check command.
We’ll be coming back to that a bit later on in this section.
In the second group along which is the Language Group, there is a button that’s labeled
Language and this is the one where we choose the language for proofing tools, such as running
a spell check.
You can also set other language preferences here.
If I click on the drop down there, Language Preferences, just go into the language page
on Options, and you can see that my default language is set currently to English United
States and I need to make sure that any proofing I do is according to English United States.
Now while we’re in there, I also want to go to the main page for proofing options in
PowerPoint 2013 which is the Proofing Page.
Now there are really three sections on this page.
The top section says AutoCorrect options.
I’m going to look at AutoCorrect options a little bit later on in this section.
There’s then a second section which says When correcting spelling in Microsoft Office
programs, again, I’m going to come back to that a little bit later on in this section
as well.
And the third section is the one we’re interested in first.
It says When correcting spelling in PowerPoint.
Now I mentioned a little while ago that you basically have two options in PowerPoint.
One of them is to have PowerPoint check the spelling as you go; the other one is to do
it as a manual exercise and we’re going to look at that first option here.
The first option within this group, this third group on the page says Check spelling as you
type.
So this is currently setup so that as I type text into a PowerPoint presentation, PowerPoint
2013 will check my spelling and it will warn me if it thinks I’ve made a spelling mistake.
If I don’t want it to do that, if I want to do all the checking myself as a sort of
batch process later on, so do it manually, I need to uncheck this box.
If I do uncheck this box, it also causes this box, the one underneath to be ticked which
says Hide spelling and grammar errors.
So what that automatically means is that if PowerPoint 2013 thinks there are spelling
or grammar errors, it won’t indicate them as I work.
The last option here is very important.
Do I want it to check grammar as well as spelling?
Now at the moment, I want it to check spelling as I type and I want it to check grammar with
spelling as well.
So I want it to check spelling and grammar.
So click on OK and let me show you how that works.
So let me now deliberately make a mistake in the word Ribbon.
I’m going to misspell it.
I’m going to take one of those B’s out and I’m going to click on the N there and
type.
Now what’s happened is that PowerPoint 2013 has spotted what it believes to be a spelling
mistake, it underlines it with a sort of squiggly red line.
You can see it there.
That indicates to me that it thinks there is a spelling error or some other error and
usually the quickest way to resolve this is if you put the cursor within the word, click
there and then right click, you get a little contextual menu but it’s a special kind
of contextual menu because it’s associated with what it believes to be a spelling or
grammar error.
Now in the top, we have a list of potential words that it thinks I may have meant.
It says did you mean Ribbon with two B’s or perhaps Ribbons with two B’s or Rib on
as two separate words?
It also says do you want to Ignore All?
Now sometimes I might put in somebody’s name or the name of a place, a city, a country,
and PowerPoint 2013 may not know that name and it may not be a name that I’m going
to use again.
So I can just say, well, actually Ribon is somebody’s name and you can just ignore
that potential problem.
If I click Ignore All, it just says, okay, you’ve told me its fine.
I’ll just ignore it.
If on the other hand Ribon was say the name of a place or the name of a person and it
was somebody or somewhere that I was going to refer to elsewhere either in other presentations
or perhaps in other Office documents, I could say I want you to add this to my personal
dictionary and that means that from now on you wouldn’t flag this word as a potential
spelling mistake.
So in that situation, I’d click on Add to Dictionary.
Now in this particular case, I recognize that it is a spelling mistake and I also recognize
that the word I meant was Ribbon so I click on Ribbon, and basically two things happen.
First of all, the word Ribbon with two B’s is substituted for the word that I had and
also PowerPoint 2013 removes the underlining.
So it’s happy with that.
Now I’m going to do some more typing and make some more mistakes.
Now first of all, notice that the word And is underlined there.
Now that is clearly not a spelling mistake because that’s how you spell And.
There’s an And right next to it so why is it complaining about that?
Well, let me just right click in there and, of course, I can see the message gives me,
tells me what the problem is.
It’s saying delete repeated word.
Now there are situations where you can repeat a word quite legitimately, but this is not
one of them.
PowerPoint 2013 Ribbon, tabs, and and there contents.
That’s not right.
If it was a valid case, I could say Ignore and it would ignore that problem.
If I wanted to delete the repeated word, which I do in this case, I just click on Delete
repeated word and it’s gone.
And I can also now see a second problem and that is that I’ve got another word which
is definitely spelled correctly, There, T-H-E-R-E.
There’s nothing wrong with the spelling there.
The problem in this case is that PowerPoint 2013 has detected a grammatical error because
if you look at that phrase now it says, PowerPoint 2013 Ribbon, tabs, and there contents.
The There here it should be the possessive there.
It should be the contents belonging to them.
Now, that wasn’t flagged initially because some types of grammatical error only become
apparent when you get far enough through a sentence.
So in this case, “There” could’ve been a valid word; that spelling of There could’ve
been valid until it managed to see some more of the sentence and then realized that I meant
the contents belonging to them.
Now if I right click in this version of There, it suggests that I really mean T-H-E-I-R,
the possessive Their, the one that means the contents belonging to them.
Again, if this was the correct spelling or if I wanted to force it to be wrong, then
I could just say Ignore, but I realize here that it should’ve been the possessive Their,
click on that one, and that error is also now corrected.
So by now you’ve seen two or three examples of how to have PowerPoint 2013 help us to
correct as we go and I want to now go back into the Options to talk about a couple of
the things that I mentioned earlier on and said we’d come back to because they’re
important as well.
In the top section here, we have what are called AutoCorrect options and much earlier
on, I mentioned that there are sort of three ways of working and this is the sort of third
way.
And that is that you don’t have to stop at having PowerPoint 2013 point out what it
thinks might be spelling and grammar errors.
You can also get it to correct certain things for you.
Now let me click on AutoCorrect Options and it brings up a dialog.
Now in this dialog, it’s actually quite extensive and I’m only going to look at
it briefly here.
But you can actually tell PowerPoint 2013 to correct certain mistakes automatically
as you go.
Let’s look at a couple of examples.
Let’s look at that one, Correct two initial capitals.
Quite a few people have a tendency to put two capital letters when they’re doing capitalization,
just a sort of natural to them error that they make frequently.
Well, if you check this box PowerPoint 2013 will correct that for you as you go.
Similarly if you tend to forget to capitalize, the first letter of sentences you can ask
PowerPoint 2013 to correct those for you as you go as well.
Similarly you can get it to capitalize the names of the days, this option here.
Now there are several of those and there are some special substitutions such as Replace
text as you type, Replace open bracket-C-close bracket with the copyright symbol, Replace
open bracket-E-close bracket with the Euro symbol, and so on.
Now there are many of these.
You can get it to do AutoFormatting such as substituting straight quotes with what are
called smart quotes, the 66/99 quotes and various other things that you can do.
As I say I’m not going to go through all of those now but that’s a good area to experiment
with if you want it to do some auto correction or perhaps in some cases auto substitution
as you type.
The other area I said we’d come back to and that we’re going to look at briefly
now is this middle one, “When correcting spelling in Microsoft Office programs” and
these are some general settings that the defaults are the ones that are set here and I generally
work with these defaults, but you may want to check through them yourself.
For instance, the first one, Ignore words in upper case.
If a word is in all upper case, do not spell check it.
Ignore words that contain numbers.
If a word contains numbers, do not spell check it.
And then things like Flag repeated words that we’ve already seen and Ignore internet and
file addresses.
So if you’ve got http://-something don’t try to spell check that.
Now just make sure that you’re happy with those and then change any that you need to.
So finally what if I don’t want it to check spelling as I type?
What if I don’t want it to check the grammar as I type?
And I really want to do this as a sort of manual exercise when I believe that I’ve
finished preparing my presentation.
Well, this is where I use the feature on the Review tab on the Ribbon which is right at
the left in the Proofing Group and its Spelling.
And this is effectively a manual spell checker that will go through the whole presentation
starting at whatever point I’m at; so in this case, at Slide 3 and it will do a spell
check for me.
So I click on that, make sure I’ve got the proofing language set correctly here, English
United States, and then it flags the errors.
The first error it finds which is on Slide 3, it finds the word Slidez with a Z and it
presents me with a number of options.
It said do you want to ignore that?
Do you want to ignore that wherever it occurs, so Ignore all?
Or do you want to add it to your dictionary?
If it is a mistake, here are possible correct versions.
Should it be Slides with an S at the end?
Should it just be Slide or Slider or Slides’ with an apostrophe after the S?
If it’s say the first one I can click on Change to change that particular occurrence
that it’s found or I can say Change All occurrences on this slide.
Now there’s only one occurrence here.
It should be the word Slides with an S so I’m just going to click on Change and it
makes that change for me.
The next error it finds is again what is obviously a misspelling.
It’s got Paragwaph with a W. It should be Paragraph.
If that had been a word which was a proper name I could always add it to the dictionary.
But again it’s a straightforward spelling mistake so click on Change.
And when it’s finished correcting everything that it thinks is incorrect you click on OK
and you’re spell check is complete.
That’s spell checking in PowerPoint 2013.
I’ll see you in
the next section.