Word 2007 "add to dictionary" glitch

If you’re like me, you need your word processing programs customized to the max for easy utilization. In Word 2007, I want an AutoCorrect like it used to be, but I’ve worked around it.

For many of us, when we upgrade, we need to take our custom.dic “custom dictionary” files with us, as we’ve spent all our time accumulating our old terms. Like former versions, the custom.dic transfers the same way. Unfortunately, this time I ran into a bit of trouble.

After putting in my own custom.dic file and loading a medical spellchecker, I no longer had the “add to dictionary” feature. It wouldn’t even give me an alternative spelling in many cases, especially where it related to my added medical spellchecker.

I solved this by:

1. Making a back-up copy of my custom.dic file and put it on my desktop. This is found in a folder called “Uproof.” Make sure this is the one on your specific user data (mine has “saph” setting, the “saph” being specifically for my use of the computer). You can just search for the Uproof folder. I was changing spellcheckers at that time, so I uninstalled the program I was using.

2. Removing the custom.dic file while using the spellchecker for the entire document (from the ribbon menu).

3.Getting rid of the custom.dic and then adding the custom.dic again. This will reset your custom.dic to a blank text document, so make sure that backup is somewhere! This gave me my “add to dictionary” feature back. Then I opened that custom.dic file, copy/pasted all my words from the original custom.dic text file back into it, saved it, closed it, restarted Word 2007, and this got me my “add to dictionary” feature plus suggestions from the spellchecker back once more.

4. Installing my new Stedman’s spellchecker, and the “add to dictionary” still worked.

I finally figured this out after about two weeks of use. If you stumble upon this, I hope it helped you :)