Outlook Express users read this before upgrading to Office 2007.

If you use Outlook Express and require spellchecking to work, then you may wish to think twice about upgrading to Office 2007.

Outlook Express works with the spellchecker built into earlier versions of Office/Word. But once you install Office 2007, your ability to spellcheck your email in Outlook Express is lost. To my knowledge there is no official fix from Microsoft to this problem.

One person contacting me for a solution (who was put onto me by Microsoft Australia support) was irate to lose their Outlook Express spellchecker after having spent hundreds of dollars upgrading to Office 2007.

There is a patch available from my site which adds spellchecking to Outlook Express and is suitable for most English speaking countries. It should be noted however the spellcheck dictionary is not as comprehensive as the Australian English spellcheck dictionary I provide. I would estimate it includes about a third of the words. However to get around the Office 2007/Outlook Express spellchecking issue, it is a good short term measure.

The spellchecking program and patch are provided by a third party and according to the developer won't be upgraded. It is an end-of-life program.

I would suggest after obtaining the spelling program (and patch if required) from my site, to think about the email clients available. Using web mail and the spellchecking dictionaries I provide with your browser, may be a good option for the future.

- Kelvin Eldridge