Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Geographic Spellcheck Strategy

I've grown tired of my Word spell checker constantly showing red underlines on my street names in Office documents. It would take months to type in all the road names into the dictionary if I wanted to use them during spellcheck. Then I realized I had a entire database of street names right in my shapefiles.

So I set out to create a Word custom dictionary in these steps:

1. Save out the road centerline file to DBF.
2. Open the DBF in Excel and delete all the columns but the road name.
3. Save As Tab Delimited.
4. Open in Word and make case changes (if necessary).
5. Copy the data into a Wordpad file. Save with a .dic extention.
6. Load the custom dictionary in Word! Viola!

Now I think I am going to do waterbodies, rivers, railways, airports, etc.....

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes you are right