Microsoft Word is a great program, but some of its features are buried. One of these is "Do not check spelling or grammar". Frequently, I find myself needing to use the spell checker and grammar checker on most of a document, but not all. One option is to spell check the whole document and click "" on those areas I know will be a problem. However, that gets tiresome. Or, I could highlight each section and run spell check. Again, this gets tiresome.

One recent example was an article I wrote about spammers intentionally misspelling words to bypass spam filters. As expected, the email examples I included caused havoc. The same problem can occur if you need to include large sections of foreign or technical text such as product specifications. The easiest thing to do is to tell Word to skip these sections.

To skip a section of a Word document from being spell checked,

1. Highlight the section using your mouse.

2. From the Tools menu, select Language and then Set Language

3. A Language dialog appears with a checkmark next to the default language.

4. Check the box labeled Do not check spelling or grammar toward the bottom.

5. Click OK.

Now when you use the spell checker, the marked passages will be skipped. One drawback to this option is the Readability Statistics dialog disappears.

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