Seems like I’m making up for not getting to post that many tech tips for the past week and pardon me if I’ve been focusing on Word 2007. Doing all of these academic writing had me staring at Word 2007 for a good number of hours lately. Long enough for me to see some of the good and the bad of 2007.

For non-Grammar Nazis like me, the spell and grammar checkers were heaven-sent. But I had my first taste of a “good” spell and grammar checker with Word 2007 compared to what I used to have with WordStar and WordPerfect in my DOS-run IBM compatible. But that’s more than a decade ago, and now I have Word 2007. Sadly, for Word and its spell and grammar checker, it seems like Microsoft never gave squat about this feature.

Experience has taught me never to trust Word’s suggestions alone. For one, the spell and grammar check doesn’t account for style anyway. And as a writer, I’m pretty much settled with my style and that includes using passive sentences which Word just loves to hate.

In any case, I’m pretty much cautious with my other work where I usually give them at least three passes to weed out lapses (unlike with the rest of my writing :P) and noticed that I still got a few lapses in grammar even if Word has confirmed that my document’s spic and span. Word does a pretty good job with spelling.

I tried to search on this issue and was led to this comparative study of available spell and grammar checkers across platforms. It employed a simple test running the twenty most common grammar lapses across the grammar checkers of commercially available word processors and guess how Word fared? Zilch. Zero out of twenty. Whew. And that’s for Word 2000 to 2003 for Windows.

I tried doing it for 2007 and pretty much with the same result - 0/20. And that’s even trying opening a document, copying and pasting without the formatting, and typing the sentences out. This is without saying that I double-checked whether grammar checking (whether with or without style) was enabled. Now isn’t all of this a sign of a crappy grammar checker.

In any case, nothing still beats a good once-over of proof-reading. But guilty as I am, I rarely do so.