spellcheck needs to check more than text boxes and memos

[markjkubicki]

so... we just recently realized that spellcheck doesn't check everything...
in particular, it doesn't check Comboboxes... this is a real big problem for my end users... (real big)

is this correct?

is there a work around?


many thanks in advance,


Mark

[rpeare]

If you are giving your users an open ended method to type in text you're never going to get good data. So my first suggestion is that you create a method to have a table that supports each of your combo boxes or one table that supports them all (depending on what type of things you want in them and what they mean). That way, when they select something it's from a list that can not be altered unless they specifically add an item, and after that everyone will see the exact same description:

for instance let's say you're choosing a car type, instead of storing Toyota, Toyta, Toota, etc which are (I assume) allowed in your current situation your table would hold a value of 1 for a 'car type' table like this:

tblCarType
CarID   CarName
1      Toyota
2      Chrysler
3      Foord

Then if someone misspells a world (foord) you can correct it on the table with the misspelling one time and it will be fixed on all your records.

The only real (relatively easy) way to do a spell check on a combo box would be to do something like copy the text value of the combo box to a text field then perform the spell check which is a bit convoluted. Combo boxes aren't meant to be free-form type-in response fields. They're really mean to be a limited, uniform, list of possible responses.

[markjkubicki]

unfortunately, our combo boxes are used as templates for text editing... limiting the entries would not be acceptable

ex: the end-user picks their basic text from choices offered in the combo; and then either leaves it as it is, or edits it for the specific project (with the list of potential edits being endless) -the probability of either is 50/50%. also, some of our combos are self populating (based on previous entries in the specific job the user is working on...) so an error once, could populate to many -simply by having been choosen from the combo.

our basic data entry does not typically result in a table, it is more likely to be returned as a sort of formatted text document.

(between a rock and a hard place)

[rpeare]

How long can the final string be? if it's memo length (more than 255 characters) you might be able to create your entire text and append it to a temporary table with a memo field, do the spell checking on the memo field and return the results. If you just want to check the spelling on the values in your text boxes you can append them to a text field and do a spell check on the combo box contents only. But there's no easy way to spell check combo boxes that I know of

[orange]

You may get some ideas from this link, but allowing users to enter raw text is a real point of weakness.
http://custom-designed-databases.com...-in-ms-access/

[markjkubicki]

hmpft

the entry could be brief 20 characters +/- or longer upto 255 characters... but never longer

[rpeare]

ComboBoxSpellCheck.zip

Like I said, copy contents of the combo box to a text file, call the spell check, replace the original text, move on to next combo box.

See example included