Introduction

Below are the most common problems clients report in tickets concerning the MS Word Spellchecker.

Issue description & Solution

The tooltip with the application to install in XTM Workbench settings (Settings → General → QA) vanishes after you hover over the icon

Solution: Clicking on the icon itself causes the popup to remain in place, solving the issue.

Spellchecking cannot be performed for a particular language due to the proofing tools not being installed for MS Office

Solution: Download and install the proofing tools for MS Office for this language. To do so, select Microsoft Word → Options → Language → Office authoring languages and proofing → Add new:

The application port is not open

The MS Word Spellchecker application is connected via a TCP protocol and needs an open port, to enable a working connection to be established.

Solution: You can check which TCP port is currently set up for the Spellchecker application in the XTM Workbench's Settings → General → QA (the default port is 8085):

To check if port 8085 is open for your network, you can use the netstat application with -ano flags in the command prompt:

netstat -ano | find "8085"

In the screenshot above, you can see that port 8085 is not open for connections: the netstat command does not return any results. To be open, the port must be listed in the netstat output and have LISTENING status.

You can check other ports if they are open, for example, port number 8086. If another port is listening, you can apply it in the XTM Workbench’s settings.

To select the new port for the Spellchecker application, you must also change it for the application's configuration file:

The default path: c:\Program Files (x86)\XTMSpellChecker\XTMSpellChecker.exe.config

In the file, you need to change the value for the add element with an attribute key="Port". The element is present under the appSettings parent element:

When the value is changed and saved, the MS Word Spellchecker should start working.

MS Word spellchecker cannot be run due to unsupported language

You might encounter the following problem in XTM Workbench after activating the application.

Solution: The error message is pretty self-explanatory so, to find out about supported target languages, tell the client about the following link that presents the list of languages that are supported by MS Word: List of supported languages.

Inability to add words to the default dictionary

You might be wondering about the lack of a way to add a word to the default dictionary when using the MS Word spellchecker.

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Solution: As you can see in the above screenshot, what is offered are just suggestions taken from the MS Word spellchecker dictionary, and XTM Cloud does not interfere with those dictionaries beyond that; so there is no option to add new words to MS Word spellchecker dictionaries via XTM Workbench. If you want to use words added to the default XTM Cloud dictionary (which you cannot modify) directly in the editor, you need to switch back to the XTM Cloud spellchecker as our application does not support the updating of MS Word dictionaries. MS Word spellchecker only replaces the default XTM spellchecker in XTM Workbench.