There have been numerous requests for Office Live Small Business to include a spelling checker among the Page Editor tools. Lacking that, some alternatives have been suggested. These include composing text in a word processor and spell-checking it there. Inspyder Insite is third party web page spelling checker I have used, and it works very well.
Today, I discovered another option, so I thought I would post a short wiki to share it. I discovered that the Google toolbar spelling checker now works in the Office Live Page Editor. I had tried this in the past without success, but now it seems to work. Open the page for editing and click on the toolbar icon. Misspellings become red and underlined. Click on the word for suggestions, then select the correct word to replace it. The GTb speller also works for posts here in the Office Live Community.
While checking a page, the speller will occasionally close itself. Click the icon again to restart it. Also, pages with HTML modules don't seem to work well with the speller. When activating it, the code in the modules re-executes, and that seems to shut down the speller.
I used the speller on two different sites, one an old beta site, the other a brand new one. I was running Internet Explorer 7 in Vista HP. There are some questions that still need to be answered:
- Will other toolbar spellers also work?
- Will they work in other operating systems?
- Will they work in other browsers and versions?
If you have an opportunity to answers these questions, feel free to post the answers in a comment below. You can download the Google toolbar by entering toolbar.google.com in your address line.
Happy spelling.