New Squiggly in Word

Everyone’s familiar with what the red, squiggly line in a Word document means right? You didn’t spell something correctly right? Just as easy is the green, squiggly line too. Green means you didn’t use the right grammar correct?

Do you know what a blue, squiggly line means? What? You’ve never seen the blue, squiggly? You’re right, you haven’t, that is unless you’re playing around with the Office 2007 beta. The blue, squiggly is a new visual alert to let you know you’ve used the wrong spelling of a word in context.

This sentence hear fore example.

If I had been typing this in Word 2007, the “hear” and the “fore” would have been identified by a blue, squiggly underline. The correct spelling of those words would have obviously been “here” and “for” respectively.

When I get to my home computer, I’ll grab a screen shot of the functionality and share it.

It’s amazing to me the amount of intellect it probably takes for Word to figure this type of stuff out. I think it would be pretty enlightening to see the code and logic behind that functionality.

Thanks to Jensen for sharing, and providing the link to more details about the rest of the activity surrounding the work being done by the Speech and Natural Language group. Jensen shares some interesting thoughts of his own behind how he believes the squiggly features improve his overall writing.