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.

Problem saving Office 2011 files to Windows 2008 shares

One of my clients just had a problem with opening Excel files on a network share.  When double clicking on a file they get the following error:

'<filename>' could not be found. Check the spelling of the file name, and verify that the file location is correct. If you are trying to open the file from your list of most recently used files on the File menu, make sure that the file has not been renamed, moved, or deleted.

Problem machine Mac OSX running Office 2011
2 windows file servers, one running Windows 2003, the other 2008

Office files can be opened on the Windows 2003 shares but not on the Windows 2008 ones
All other files can be opened fine on the Windows 2008 server

So, I went to another Mac, running Office 2004 and it all works fine.  I then looked at a third Mac running Office 2011 - this can open office files from both servers fine too.

I finally tracked the problem down to the way the shares had been mounted - as soon as I mounted the Windows 2008 share via AFP rather than SMB it all worked.

Note that the Windows 2003 shares work fine with Office 2011 mapped via SMB and the Windows 2008 shares work fine via SMB when using Office 2004,


So the problem was specifc to Office 2011 connecting to a Windows 2008 share via SMB


Connect to the share via AFP and you are good to go!