Are you an Outlook Express user? If so, you might want to be wary of installing Office 2007. At the least, you’ll have to change your ways a bit…
If you install Office 2007 and you use Outlook for your emails, or use anything other than Outlook Express, you won’t be affected by this problem.
But, if you use Outlook Express for email, you may be in for a shock. Your expensive, new Office 2007 just broke the spell checker that you use in Outlook Express.
That’s right, when you install Office 2007, it removes the older spell-check files for English, Spanish and German. It installs new versions — versions that Outlook Express can not read.
Why does it do this? I believe this was “a marketing decision by Microsoft.” Microsoft wants everyone to change to their new operating system, Windows Vista, which doesn’t have Outlook Express (it includes a new program called Microsoft Mail). Microsoft was able, by breaking the spell checking in OE, to give you one more little motivation to upgrade to Windows Vista. I doubt that this will actually do anything more than infuriate their customers.
Outlook Express doesn’t actually come with a functional spell checker. It has the hooks for one, but the programming isn’t part of OE, and the Spell Check function in the Outlook Express menu bar is grayed out. But, if you installed Microsoft Office, then Microsoft Word’s spell checker linked into Outlook Express — and, all of a sudden, you had a spell checker in OE.
At this point, you’ve got a few choices:
- switch to Outlook for email
- switch to Eudora, Thunderbird or any of the other third-party email programs
- find a shareware or freeware spell-checker for Outlook Express
- forget about spell-checking your emails, or
- write all your emails in French so you can spell check them
If you don’t know French, check out Rocket French so you can use the only spell checker left in Outlook Express with Office 2007 — French.
Or, if you want to learn another language, try Rocket Spanish and Rocket German.
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