Automated Spell Checking

by Matt Petrowsky

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Spell checking seems like one of those subtle little afterthoughts. You either know you need it or it almost doesn't exist. But, of course, it's always there. This isn't how it used to be. It used to be that you had to check everything manually if you wanted to catch those typos.

With the OS picking up a bunch of the work in the last decade, pretty much any application can simply show which words are misspelled. This is the familiar red-dotted, or some other color, underline we now see when a word is misspelled.

While this particular feature, in FileMaker, can be turned on or off at both the field level and the file level, it doesn't cover all the new words and terms which inevitably show up as we move forward through time.

If you have any type of need which may benefit from the custom dictionary then watching this video will help provide some insight into making things work much more smoothly. At least when it comes to spell checking the content in your database fields.

With our work lives becoming a bit more distributed, this particular technique may be quite helpful to those with industry heavy specific jargon!