First look at Notepad's Spell Checker: surprise, it is not as bad as it sounds

[harlan4096]

While Microsoft continues to kill some apps, including WordPad and Cortana, it is giving other classic apps some love.

Notepad is one of these. After enabling tab-support and auto-saving, the Redmond-based company is now working on spell checking and AI features.
The current status of the feature exists since April 2024. Microsoft rolled out an updated version of the Notepad app to Beta and Release Preview channels of
Windows 11. Not all users have received the functionality by now, but it appears that the company is preparing for a release to the stable Windows population.

The initial spell checking version was 11.2402.18.0, but Microsoft released new versions since then.

Notepad's spell checker



The latest version of Windows' Notepad app with spell checkingThe best way to check if spell checking is available is to click on Settings and see if a Spelling section is available. Spell checking is supported if you see it listed there.

Good news: The spell checker does not require an active Internet connection. This means that your data is not transferred to Microsoft when spell checking is enabled or used. It is interesting to note that Notepad will spell check multiple languages, including those not installed as a language pack on the system.

The feature works as expected. Notepad highlights words that it believes are misspelled. A right-click and the selection of spelling from the menu displays suggestions.

There are also options to add a word to the dictionary, ignore the word or all words that Notepad highlighted as incorrectly spelled, and to turn off spell checking entirely.
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