- [Narrator] Spell check is a pretty essential tool,

but sometimes there are words that you don't want

the spellchecker to mark for you.

For example, the name of this company has been marked

as a spelling mistake.

That's what the red underline means.

But it's not actually spelled wrong,

it's just a word that the computer doesn't know yet.

To fix this, you can not right-click on a misspelled word

and choose Add to Dictionary.

Now it's no longer marked as a spelling mistake

and in the future, when I type it,

Word will always remember it.

But let's take a little closer look at that dictionary.

I'm going to click on File to go to the backstage view.

Then I'll go to Options.

Then I'll go to the Proofing category,

and I'll click on Custom Dictionaries.

Here, you will see a list of one or more dictionary files.

You should at least see the one that's called Custom.

And if you are on Windows and you sign into your computer

with a Microsoft online account,

then you may also see this Roaming Custom file.

That file is tied to your Microsoft account.

So if you sign into or than one Windows computer

with that account, it will synchronize over.

Having multiple dictionary files is just fine.

Word will check all of them when it checks the spelling.

If you have multiple dictionaries,

one of them will be marked as the default.

And that's the one where the new words will be stored

when you tell Word to remember them.

I like to keep my Roaming Custom dictionary

set as the default,

because that's the one that will work

across multiple computers.

So you could select any one of these dictionaries

and you can hit Edit Word List

and see all of the words that have been saved

to that dictionary.

And you can make changes if you want.

You can see that I already have my name in here.

I can see the word that we just added,

just by right-clicking on it.

I could delete any of these if I wanted to,

or I could add more.

So I do work for a company called Two Trees.

It is two words, but sometimes they write it like this.

So I want to type that in, click add,

and now that is in my custom dictionary.

So it will not be marked as a spelling mistake

in the future.

Now, on a Mac, this works a little bit differently.

So here on the Mac, I can see

that there are two words that are being marked

as spelling mistakes.

And of course I could right-click on one

and choose Add to Dictionary,

just like we did on Windows.

But if you want to manually edit that dictionary file,

we'll need to go into Preferences.

So I'll go to the main application menu,

then to Preferences,

then to Spelling & Grammar,

and I'll click on Dictionaries.

I only have one here,

so I want to make sure that's checked,

and then I'll click Edit.

Now, this is an important warning.

When you edit a custom dictionary on the Mac,

it will disable the spell-checking tool.

So you need to remember to turn spellchecker back on

when you're finished.

So I'll click Okay here.

And what's actually going to happen here

is it's going to open the dictionary file

as if it were a document in Word.

So you don't need to change any of these options,

just click okay.

And now this is that custom dictionary file.

So we just see that one word that I added a moment ago.

Let's add one more.

I'll add Twotrees in here.

I'm not going to add Kineteco.

So I'm just going to leave it as it is.

And I'm going to save it.

And I can just click Yes here, and I can close that.

But now, I do need to make sure

to turn the spellchecker back on.

So I'll go back into Preferences,

back to Spelling & Grammar

and turn on this option to check spelling as you type.

And we can see that my name is not being marked

as a spelling mistake

because that was saved in the dictionary,

but we did not save this word in the dictionary

so that one is still being marked.

And if I type in this one,

which is the other word that we just added,

it's not going to be marked as a mistake.

So if you have special words that you type

in your documents,

don't just live with those red underlines.

It's better to take control of your custom dictionary.

(upbeat music)