Microsoft Word- Disable Spell Check

[rhoward]

Hello everyone,

We have situations for our school where we need to turn off MS Word Spell check for when kids take final exams. We use laptop carts totaling 160-200 MacBook Airs. These are used throughout the year. We tried to make a composer package and monitor file system changes, but it did not work as through our testing. Does anyone have any suggestions that are easier than manually turning of spell check on 200 machines?

[perrycj]

You can try running this command in terminal and/or via a script/Casper remote:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticSpellingCorrectionEnabled -bool NO

and re-enable it at a later time by changing NO to YES.

[agurley]

I was playing with this last week. Start with deleting the contents of /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/Shared Applications. I see two folders: Text Converters and Proofing Tools - deleting Proofing Tools only may be sufficient, but I removed them both. Disable network connections so students can't use MS Word's dictionary to look up spellings, and add some software restrictions so they can't launch Dictionary & whatever else would help with spelling.

[rhoward]

Thanks for the responses! When the exams happen, they submit them electronically (yay for less paper waste) so disabling the network connections is tough. Doing the Terminal command does not turn off Office spell check because it is built in. Removing the Application Proofing tools seems to work. I'll test it out and let everyone know about it!

[Chris_Hafner]

Yep. I tend to completely remove the dictionaries and proofing tools when it's critical to completely disable it (We disable all spellcheck from the system for SAT accommodations). I even keep a configuration for it.

[talkingmoose]

Adding my 2¢.

Yes, Office for Mac has its own spell-checker and doesn't use Apple's (except for Outlook).

I'm not a fan, though, of altering a software installation to solve an issue unless it's absolutely the only way. While I haven't tested, it should be possible to use configuration profiles in Casper to disable spell-check. Word uses a plist file and that plist file stores the preferences set in Word menu > Preferences > Spelling and Grammar and Word menu > Preferences > AutoCorrect.

A configuration profile would be a non-destuctive and very quick way of disabling spell-check. Just remove the profile to re-enable spell-check.

[RobertHammen]

A huge +1. Unless you have no other choice, you are far better off scripting or using a configuration profile or a script/policy to effect a settings change, than fundamentally altering a software package's functionality by removing components.

[Chris_Hafner]

Just wondering here. If these are cart machines, are they being wiped before/after? If that's the case, what's the problem with creating a spell check free installer/OS configuration. It's likely to be more successful that a script as you can test and distribute them without variation. Here the SAT board ensures that we permanently disable all of the systems Spell Check capacity for students with accommodations. Hence, we use loaner units instead of their personal machines to help ensure compliance. If we screw up even once we're toast. Probably a different situation though which is why I'm asking ;-)

P.S> just talking from experience, having a "non-spell check capable" configuration for 4-5 years now, MS Office operates beautifully (2004, 2008 and 2011). It simply no longer offers the spell check or thesaurus once those dictionaries and proofing tools are removed. Proofing tools are an optional component anyways. Just saying.

[achmelvic]

Has anyone find a good means of doing this for Office 2016? We also have exams where the student's aren't allowed to have the spelling an grammer check turned on.
Unfortunately the rooms they'll be in are general use so re-imaging the iMac just for one session isn't practical however they will have special exam logins (AD) so I'm thinking a policy could be scoped to their usernames.
Following some investigation I've found the settings for turning on and off spell checking etc in Word are saved in:
~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/MicrosoftRegistrationDB.reg
So far overwritting this file with one from an account with the settings turned off seems to work and setting the ACL for the file so they don't have write access to it seems to work whereby when Word is closed and reopened the settings revert however I can't come up with a means of stopping them going into preferences in Word whilst it's open and turning stuff back on during the exam.
Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

[apizz]

I too want to know!

What's everyone's implementation of preventing spell check and locking down other settings on the Mac?? Not just "we use a profile", but PLISTs, settings, etc.

Traditionally we've used Windows laptops for testing because Notepad doesn't have any spell check functionality. The only downside is for language exams, as it's much easier to create accented letters on Mac (at least compared to Windows Alt codes).

[darrell_rennie]

Here's what we use, seems to get the job done

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

mv /Applications/Dictionary.app /Applications/Dictionary.app.old

Then to re enable:

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

mv /Applications/Dictionary.app.old /Applications/Dictionary.app

January 2019 update

I've found that now we have to use

chmod 770 /Applications/Microsoft Word.app/Contents/SharedSupport/

then back to 755 will re-enable

[cireangel]

I second what darrell.rennie says. What I did recently was remove the permissions from the proofing folder.

Remove permission from folder - this will disable spell check

chmod 000 /Applications/Microsoft Word.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Proofing Tools

Remove the Autocorrect settings within the Word app, then copy over the DB file referenced below, wrap it up using Composer and push it out to computers:

~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/MicrosoftRegistrationDB.reg

We also remove internet access by adding a pseudo-web proxy to disable internet access

networksetup -setwebproxy Wi-Fi 0.0.0.0 80
networksetup -setsecurewebproxy Wi-Fi 0.0.0.0 443

We also disable the following apps to make it a more secure testing environment:

chmod -x /Applications/Firefox.app
chmod -x /Applications/Google Chrome.app
chmod -x /Applications/Safari.app
chmod -x /Applications/Dictionary.app
chmod -x /Applications/Notes.app
chmod -x /Applications/TextEdit.app
chmod -x /Applications/Stickies.app
chmod -x /Applications/Keynote.app
chmod -x /Applications/Microsoft Excel.app/
chmod -x /Applications/Microsoft Power Point.app/
chmod -x /Applications/TextWrangler.app
chmod -x /Applications/Pages.app
chmod -x /Applications/Numbers.app
chmod -x /Applications/Messages.app

Note that you will have to disable SIP in order to chmod some of the Apple Native apps. What I did instead of disabling SIP was create a launchdaemon that killed the process of Notes, TextEdit, Dictionary, and Stickies. It runs every 3 seconds.

[mattfromfreemen]

Remove the Autocorrect settings within the Word app, then copy over the DB file referenced below, wrap it up using Composer and push it out to computers: ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/MicrosoftRegistrationDB.reg We also remove internet access by adding a pseudo-web proxy to disable internet access networksetup -setwebproxy Wi-Fi 0.0.0.0 80 networksetup -setsecurewebproxy Wi-Fi 0.0.0.0 443

Cireangel, do you have instructions on how to wrap the preference file using Composer? I'm very new to this sort of thing but need to get a Macbook prepared for an exam environment, which means no Autocorrect in Word and no Wi-Fi either.

Thanks if you or anyone else can help on this matter.

[GabeShack]

@darrell.rennie I like this approach as well and added a chmod 770 on /Applications/Microsoft Word.app/Contents/Frameworks/ProofingUI.framework/Versions/A/Resources/en.lproj which causes the program to quit if the autocorrect preference is accessed.

Gabe Shackney
Princeton Public Schools

[user-UMlzGHBsyi]

Does Word 2019 also store the spelling tools here?
/Applications/Microsoft Word.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Proofing Tools
(So renaming the files or directory disables spell check)