Spell Checking Web Pages in Internet Explorer: Part 1

On many occasions, while browsing through the pages of your favorite web sites on the Internet, connecting with your friends through social networking sites, or simply filling out an online form, you may think how nice it would be if you could check the spelling of the text in the web pages you are viewing.

It would be even nicer if you could check the spelling right from within Internet Explorer while you are browsing the page, without going through the pains of copying all the text to be spell checked and then pasting it into a word processor such as Microsoft Word that is enabled with spell checking functionality.

If you're wondering if this is possible, we say 'Yes'. It IS possible, and it's quite easy, too, for you to enable spell checking functionality within Internet Explorer.

Generally speaking, there are two ways that you can adopt for enabling spell checking within Internet Explorer. The first one is to use some scripts or applications that activate the Microsoft Word spell checker right within your Internet Explorer window so that you can check the spellings of the text pertaining to the web page you are currently browsing. As these scripts or applications do nothing but invoke a feature of a Microsoft application within yet another Microsoft application (Internet Explorer), it is inevitable these scripts require that Microsoft's Windows Script Hosting has been installed and is properly working upon your Windows based PC.

The second way is to use a spell checking application specially developed for enabling spell checking within Internet Explorer and/or other web browsing applications. Several software applications are available to fulfill this purpose - some of which are freeware, and a few are classified as shareware, too.

A script in VBScript (Visual Basic Scripting Edition), a scripting language by Microsoft, has been written to enable spell checking in 5.x versions of Internet Explorer. This .vbs script, named “IE Context Menu Speller” is available for free at the website http://www.pcnineoneone.com/tweaks/ie_context_menu_speller.zip. The script is really easy to install and use, but it comes with two major drawbacks. The first one is that it is compatible ONLY with 5.x versions of Internet Explorer so that makes it rather obsolete. The second one is that YOU MUST HAVE Microsoft Word and Windows Scripting Host version 5.1 installed upon your system for this script work properly.

This script basically makes the built-in spell checker functionality of Microsoft Word work for you while you are browsing a web page in Internet Explorer. Still, for the people still preferring older versions of the Internet Explorer, it might be useful enough.

• First of all, copy the IE Context Menu Speller zip file into a temporary directory. This directory must exist in your Windows installation drive and partition.
• Now, unzip the file into the directory, and open Install_Spell_It.vbs by double clicking it. The script will be installed, and once you restart Internet Explorer and select some text upon a web page, the right-click menu will have a new button named “Spelling”.
• Just select the button, and the spell checker of Microsoft Word will be opened for you to spell check the text selected within your web page.