Wednesday 18 May 2011

Unable to Spell Check Signatures In Outlook

A couple of our clients have asked how to get Outlook to spell check their signatures when sending emails recently.  At first I thought this was entirely unnecessary as you should just check the spelling when you create the signature and it shouldn't change after that.  But one of these clients has quite a fancy signature consisting of a sidebar and the email message gets typed along side that - as this then falls within the signature block it does not get spell checked.

We did quite a bit of research on this and everything we found said that it is not possible to enable spell checking in signatures in any version of Outlook.

However, I found a workaround.  It's really quite simple and I wouldn't normally post something like this here, but as everyone else is saying it is impossible I thought I really should point out how to do it.

Use stationery instead.

That's it, just move the signature html file from the signature folder under the user profile and place it in the stationery folder.  Then disable the signature and go into Stationery and set this as your theme instead.

And there you go, the "signature" is now spell checked correctly.

3 comments:

  1. Not entirely sure why, but this didn't quite work for me. I have a centered header and footer with content in the middle, which was all originally a signature. Obviously spell check didn't work with that setup, so I moved it all to stationery and removed the signature, but spell check was still disabled.

    What I ended up with was having to align all to the left, put the header in stationery and the footer in signature, and optionally include a 1 column table without borders to keep content within the header/footer width. Unfortunately the table border always shows by default if it's in either, so it's more hassle (right click, remove border) than it's worth most of the time.

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  2. Worked great - !!!! Great work-around... Only limitation, is that you are locked into one Stationary (signature). Is there a way to switch between different Stationary?

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  3. But It doesnt work when you reply emails :)

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