Spellchecking is only half the tale yarn story 30 June, 2006
I’ve been trying to move away from using Word for writing my documents for ages. It’s bloated. It’s difficult to do anything other than top down reports. And, if you do attempt anything fancy, it’s buggy as hell! But there are two killer features that ensure no matter how alluring other applications seem, I always come back to Word: live spellchecking and thesaurus. They seem so simple, but I can’t live without them.
Live spellchecking has started to make its way into lots of other products that I would prefer to use. The latest version of InDesign now has the red squiggles. Writely has them (sort of) and so does Semagic (the tool I use for updating this blog). But a thesaurus seems to have gone by the wayside. Perhaps it’s seen as an ‘advanced’ feature. Could be that it’s difficult to implement. Or maybe designers and other such folks don’t need it. That’s wrong. Good software helps you work (and play) better. And if you care about what you say a thesaurus offers you better ways to say it. So developers and interface designers, if your customers are using a product that supports writing they need both, because when you’re working with words, spellchecking is only half the story.