How to Spell Check in Excel in 2 minutes (2024 Tutorial)
Excel is a spreadsheet program used to manipulate numbers.
It is not as advanced as other word processing programs when it comes to spell and grammar checks. But, it still offers an in-built spell-checking feature that will work out all your typos in no time. 😃
Read the article that follows to learn all about spell check in Excel.
While you scroll down, download our free sample workbook to practice along the guide.
Table of Contents
How to spell check in Excel
All versions of Microsoft Excel starting from Excel 2010 (or older) to Excel 2016 (and newer) have the spell check function.
Not as smart as the spell-check of Microsoft Word, but good enough to keep you from sounding dumb.
The image below shows a sentence written in Excel. (It has some evident spelling mistakes.)
Unlike MS Word, Excel would not underline text to highlight errors. Be those spelling errors or grammatical errors.
Kasper Langmann, Microsoft Office Specialist1. Select the cell (or select multiple cells) where spell-check is to be applied (Cell A1).
2. Use the keyboard shortcut for spell check by pressing ‘F7’.
3. This launches the Spelling dialog box as follows.
The Auto Spell detects each misspelled word. For each spelling error, there is a suggested spelling or many suggested spellings. From these spellings, you can choose the right spelling.
4. Choose the correct spelling for ‘Apple’ from the Suggestions. Hope we all know the correct spelling 😊
5. Click ‘Change’.
The spelling feature also offers suggestions for other misspelled words in the selected cell.
6. Once you have changed them all, the sentence will be corrected.
Pro Tip!
Instead of clicking ‘change’, there are some other options too.
- Ignore Once: Don’t change the spelling and let this instance be.
- Ignore All: Don’t change the spelling and ignore words spelled like this in the selection.
- Change All: Change all the words of the selected cell spelled like this.
Other options? Keep reading through the article to explore them in detail.
Spell Check from the Ribbon:
This is only one way of performing spell check.
You may also launch the Spelling dialog box by going to Ribbon > Review Tab > Proofing > Spelling.
Add to dictionary
Here’s what the Spelling dialog box looks like.
What does the ‘Add to dictionary’ option mean? By clicking on this option, you add a word to the Excel dictionary.
Such words are then not treated as wrongly spelled words.
Why would you need to do this?
Maybe because you have a customer named Mr. Noya. And his name is commonly used in your spreadsheets.
However, Excel doesn’t recognize the word Noya and treats it as a spelling error.
That is when you’d want to add his name to the Excel dictionary. This will save you the hassle of ignoring it every time Excel identifies it as a wrongly spelled word.
Change Autocorrect options
Some of the times, an automated Spell Check might be annoying. If that is the case, you can tweak the Excel Spell Check default settings very easily. 😉
1. Go to File > Excel Options > Proofing.
Look out for ‘When correcting spelling in Microsoft Office programs.’
You’d find many options under this header.
You can check or uncheck any spell-check option as desired. That’s how spell check works.
Spell check multiple sheets or all sheets
Can you perform spell check across a single cell or sheet only?
Certainly not. You can perform a spell check on multiple sheets and even across the whole workbook in one go.
Spell-check multiple sheets
Performing spell check on multiple sheets is as simple as explained below.
1. Hold down the Ctrl button and select the sheets from the Sheet Tab where the spell check is to be performed.
What if you want to select multiple consecutive sheets (say from Sheet 1 to Sheet 4)? You don’t need to select each one of them.
Instead, select Sheet 1, hold down the Shift button and select Sheet 4.
Excel would select all sheets starting from Sheet 1 to Sheet 4.
Kasper Langmann, Microsoft Office Specialist2. Once selected, press the key F7. Or go to the Review Tab > Proofing > Spelling.
This launches the Spell Check dialog box that detects spelling errors across all the selected sheets. Data across the entire worksheet is checked for spelling errors.
Spell-check all sheets
To perform a spell check against the entire workbook, perform the steps below.
1. Right-click on any sheet of the workbook.
2. From the menu that opens up, click on ‘Select All Sheets’.
This selects all sheets of the workbook.
3. Press the key F7. Or go to the Review Tab > Proofing Group > Spelling Button.
This launches the Spell Check dialog box. This time it will check for spelling errors across the entire workbook.
That’s it – Now what?
Spell check is an indispensable feature of almost every program. Like all applications of Microsoft, Excel also has an in-built spell-check feature.
But, Excel doesn’t automatically highlight misspelled words or repeated words. In short, Excel doesn’t offer an AutoCorrect feature.
And you have to run a spell check to detect spelling errors in your spreadsheet. The above article presents to you all the ways to run spell check in Excel.
Spell check, though crucial, is only a small feature of Excel. There are other important functions of Excel that you must learn.
These include the VLOOKUP, SUMIF, and IF functions. Register here for my free 30-minute email course that teaches you these functions (and more!).
Other resources
Spell Check is only one of the many amazing features and functions of Excel. If you enjoyed learning about Spell Check in Excel, you’d also enjoy reading our other blogs posts.
Check out our other articles on entering a new line into a cell from the formula bar and wrapping text in Excel.