Introduction

Below are the most common problems clients put forward in tickets with regard to the MS Word Spellchecker.

Issue description & Solution

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

Solution: Clicking on the very icon causes the pop-up to remain and thus solves the issue.

The spellchecking cannot be performed for a certain 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. This can be done in Microsoft Word → Options → Language → Office authoring languages and proofing → Add new:

The application port is not open

The MS Word Spellchecker application is connected through a TCP protocol and needs an open port to establish a proper connection to work.

Solution: You can check what the 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"

On the screenshot above you can see that the port 8085 is not open for connections - the netstat command does not return any results. To be open, the port must be present in netstat and have the 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 to the XTM Workbench’s settings.

To have the new port working 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 Workbench after activating the application.

Solution: The error message is pretty self-explanatory, so in order to find out about supported target languages, make sure the client gets acquainted with the following link that presents the list of supported languages by MS Word: List of supported languages.

Lack of possibility to add words to the default dictionary

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

Solution: As you can see in the above screenshot, what is offered are just suggestions coming from the MS Word spellchecker dictionary, and XTM does not interfere with those dictionaries beyond that; therefore, 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 XTM default dictionary (which is not available for you to modify) directly in the editor, then you need to switch back to the XTM spellchecker since our application does not support updating MS Word dictionaries. MS Word spellchecker replaces only the default XTM spellchecker in Workbench.