Is American spelling causing you a problem in Microsoft Office, Word or Outlook?

Many people mention they have a problem with American spelling in their documents. I’ve heard of lecturers frowning on students using American spelling, from a number of people attending different tertiary institutions.

The problem isn’t the spelling, it is that most people assume that spelling words with “ize” is using the American spelling. In Australia we have the unusual situation where we have two or more ways to spell thousands of words. For example “organise” and “organize” are both correct in Australia. However the preferred spelling is “organise” and if you use “organize”, people will often consider the spelling is wrong.

It is now very easy to use the preferred Australian English spelling with the Exclude file I make available for Word 2003, Outlook 2003, Office 2007 and Office 2010 (which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access). The Exclude file marks thousands of words as incorrect spelling so you can easily use the preferred spelling, which also has the advantage of resulting in consistent spelling in your documents.

For more information visit the Microsoft Exclude page.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au
Helping Australians one word at a time.