How can I disable proofing in OS X and MS Word 2016

tmace
New Contributor

Dear all,

I have had a hunt around and cannot find any information regarding this topic but my apologies if I have missed a post.

We have a student who's usual way of working is their Macbook Air and Word 2016.
This statement allows them to use the laptop in their exam's for certain subjects.

It is mandated by the examination board that the laptop that is used must:
-Not have the ability to connect to the internet (I have this one covered)
-Not be able to use applications that may emulate banned items i.e. calculator in business (I have this one covered)
-Not be able to use proofing tools, spelling, grammer, thesaurus checks in any of the word processing applications that are used. This is where I require help

I need to be able to turn off system wide proofing and Word 2016 proofing whilst denying the ability for the user to reenable them.
Has anyone done this already?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards,
TMace

3 REPLIES 3

Chris
Valued Contributor

Specifically for Word, you could probably remove or chmod -R 700 the

/Applications/Microsoft Word.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Proofing Tools

folder.
Regarding the OS itself, this older thread has some ideas.

tmace
New Contributor

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the reply.

Spot on with the chmod that seemed to work, it still auto capitalises but I could turn that off for now and ask the invigilators to ensure they do not change the preference as it stands unless anyone has an idea here.

Unfortunatly the older thread suggests a similar idea as to here http://www.chromescreen.com/disable-spell-checker-in-mac-osx-system-wide/
This doesn't appear to work under High Sierra. Apple duly say operation not permitted within terminal or this can't be deleted because it is required by macOS in the GUI.

Any further ideas?

gskibum
Contributor III

Looking back at the other thread I have an idea. Have you tried using Restricted Software to block the AppleSpellService process?

I'm not sure how many Macs you're needing to manage this way, but if just a few, disabling SIP ought to let you get rid of those files. From the recovery partition run csrutil disable. Then reboot and delete the files. Reboot again and empty the trash. Then go back to recovery and run csrutil enable.