Acer Aspire One has Outlook Express with French.

People upgrading their computer to Office 2007 are finding their Outlook Express spellchecking stops working. More of a concern, are brand new computers, such as the Acer Aspire One netbook, come with Outlook Express and French spellchecking as the only option.

Microsoft by now should have released a patch to fix this issue, as it is causing a lot of people grief.

The solution many people around the world find acceptable is the spell.exe program made available by Vampirefo. For those who don't want to use American English, a patch also provided by Vampirefo in response to my request for assistance, changes spell.exe to check using the spelling variation more commonly used in Australia, and other countries, such as England and New Zealand. For example "colour" and "organise" will be the correct spelling and not "color" and "organize".

You can download the program and patch from the dictionary project on the Outlook Express page.

I highly recommend reviewing all your email and spellchecking options if you are using Outlook Express, as Vampirefo has indicated the programs will not be updated. My testing shows the dictionary files have a very usable subset of the language, but this is probably only 30-40% of the current Australian English dictionary files I provide. The dictionary projects provides you with many more options with email and Australian English spellchecking.

Right now, to get around your Outlook Express spellchecking issues, unless of course French is your preferred language, the program from Vampirefo is one of your best short term options.

Thank you to Vampirefo for making these files available and assisting Justlocal users.

Happy spellchecking.

- Kelvin Eldridge

PS. If this issue is causing you grief, please feel free to add a comment to this post. If enough people comment, I will pass this information on to my contacts in Microsoft Australia.