Word 2004 Auto Spell Check Broken

[patrickg]

Since upgrading to Tiger, the Automatic Spell Checker in Word 2004 no longer identifies misspellings (with those wavy red lines). The spelling section of the preference pane is grayed out and does not allow modification. The curious thing is that spelling still works correctly in Entourage, but that Word problem remains the same when I switch to a "clean" user account.

After checking some forums, I tried some suggestions:
1. The language settings are set to US English
2. The system preferences are set to English
3. Deleting the following preference files has no effect:
com.microsoft.Word.prefs.plist
com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist

MacOSX 10.4.1
Office 2004 11.1.0

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks

Patrick

[scsiobhan]

I was having this same issue. If you installed Office 2004 without the language translations, as I did, then the spellcheck is broken. I went back with my Office 2004 cd and installed the language translations, unchecking everything but English, and when I next launched Word, I was able to set my Spelling and Grammar preferences. I hope this helps!