I recently conducted a small poll on SolidWorks Yahoo! Group asking who was using SolidWorks Spelling Check. To my surprize, almost half (so far) have never even hear of Spelling Check.
Only 21% of respondents use Spelling Check regularly. I guess the next question is, “Why aren’t more people using this seemingly obvious tool in SolidWorks?” Is there a good answer for that? From my own experience, I use Lenny’s CommonNotes, which means most of my general notes are pre-fabbed. Since the bulk of the text appears in the general notes, there isn’t much text left in the body of the drawing where misspellings can hide. So, out of a lack for necessity, I’m in the “Yes, sometimes” category.
Here’s the kicker. For the Spelling Check to work, Microsoft Word has to be installed since SolidWorks piggybacks the Microsoft spell checker.
This brings me to another point. Why does this tool have a weird name? We all know this function is a spell checker. So, why is it referred to as “Spelling Check” in SolidWorks? This seems to be a rather odd quirk.
(To access Spelling Check, open a drawing and goto Tools pulldown>Spelling….)