The Mac's Spell Check — Why So Awful?

It is not a recent thing!

This has bothered me forever and I cannot comprehend why Apple has not fixed this.

It has always made Mail an inefficient program and a major PITA.

If the spell check can pick out the wrongly spelled words then it should be able to make some suggestions too. MS Word has had this ability since the dawn of times.

This is so symptomatic for Apple's priorities and general attitude:
"We don't really care about real usability. Functioning spell check in your most used program on your computer? Forget it, give me your money. Haha!"

This is one one the (many) reasons I feel like Apple is no longer for me: Still no working "suggestions function" in Mail! How do they get away with it? Just u-n-b-e-l-i-e-v-a-b-l-e.

Example from just now (Norwegian interface, but English "spell check" 🙂):

Please continually improve or entirely replace the auto correction tools with all Apple Products. The correction tools entirely diminished the integrity and quality of the those who write meaningful words, to the external world. That includes SIRI. A simple question regarding what is the Tide schedule yields football reports at the University of Alabama (i've never been a fan of football nor Alabama). Quite often the meaning, the context of a sentence structure is 180 degrees off, unless you spend twice as much time evaluating the sentence, spelling, and context. In other words you create 3 times the amount of work, when you correct one word. It is horribly "slacking" and diminishing all of the great attributes of Apple products. Especially with IPADS. I've heard Airline Pilots mention, they can not even create a Paragraph, nothing but an extremely long written path. Since some things in life are complex, and many have implemented your equipment as a means of communicating, please update the capability to something like "grammarly", or I will just turn off why I bought the communication tools I so desire to use.

Apple spell check is for people that don't make spelling errors. It's crap. I have always had the exact same complaint. If Goole can do it then Apple should get off their ***** and do it. Yes, I can use "add to dictionary" but the point is I shouldn't have to.

Agreed!! this is so frustrating as I am a terrible speller, only fair typist, and as a writer I depend so much on spellcheck.

Agreed that Apple should have fixed this LONG ago. I know how to look a word up, and add to dictionary, but the point is, I should not have to do this ALL the time, with the simplest of words.

So pleased I found this thread - the user experience on Mac is getting worse imo and it seems to be things like the spell checker and Mail - there's seems to be no concern that their software is losing ground and is starting to become not "for for purpose"

Manual windows are better because I have a phobia of crashing in water, that way I can lower the windows without them failing on me 🙂

Also yeh that sums up the Mac, still greater than anything else though

approximaltey

You mean like this?

FWIW, this is a user to user forum. No one from Apple here. You could post to: http://www.apple.com/feedback/ but since it works I don't see the point.

Check your spell check settings.

Hip89 wrote:

Thanks for your reply, dialabrain.

That is very interesting that the Mac's spellcheck suggestions work OK for you. They definitely do no work OK for me, as you can see:

I have tried this using US, British, Canadian and Australian English, and I get the same result. There aren't really many spelling settings on the Mac, so I don't think this can be an issue of spelling settings. I get the same issue whether or not I select "Correct Spelling Automatically", or whether or not I select "Check Grammar With Spelling".

I appreciate that this is a user to user forum, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Apple reads it from time to time.

If this bothers you so much, go into System Preferences --> Keyboard --> Text and press the ➕ button. In the left column, type "approximaltey" and in the right column, type "approximately." That way, when you accidentally type the former, it will replace it with the latter.

You should probably just use Goole, then.

Hip89 wrote:

Thanks for your reply, dialabrain.

That is very interesting that the Mac's spellcheck suggestions work OK for you. They definitely do no work OK for me, as you can see:

I owe you an apology. I didn't think about it until today but my result was because I was in Firefox which doesn't use OSX's spell checking but its own dictionary. I did play with spelling variations of approximately using OSX's spell checking and as you mentioned above, sometimes the correct spelling is offered and sometimes "no guesses" is the result. All I could tell is how a word is misspelled makes a difference.

It remains to be seen what if anything will change in future versions of OSX.

Pretty sure this is a recent thing- I've never had a problem with mac spell checking before the last year or so. maybe an El Capitan thing, though feels slightly more recent than that... really annoying!

I agree. The spellcheck and grammar check function in Apple Mail is terrible and it's unconscionable that Apple lets it continue torturing users in this way. For instance, why does it continue to highlight and question the use of the word "are" in the simplest, correct sentences such as "I was wondering if you are coming to the meeting?", or highlight and question the correct use of the contraction "you're" in a sentence such as "If you're ready to have some fun" (always asking if I mean the incorrect word "your"!). Or highlighting and questioning the word "is" in a typed sentence with the words "this is not accurate". And why does it give options I have to click such as "next" or "ignore" with no "learn" option so it will stop questioning in every single one of hundreds and thousands of emails? Apple, what is your answer to this? Show you actually care about customers and fix it.