Count Spelling Errors

[FloBob]

Hello everyone,

I am developing an audit tool at the moment, so that our customers can count how many spelling errors they might have in a claim. My question is, Is there a way to count the amount of mispelled words in a set amount of information, whithout correcting them or prompting on each one? Idealy I would just like to give my users a list of possible mispelled words and allow them to choose which ones are correctly spelled (we're in the medical field so its often not in the dictonary) and the tally it from there. Thanks in advance of any help you may offer, I greatly appreciate it.

 

[Shep]

What criteria would you envision using to generate a list of words which are possibly misspelled? It is likely that no string function in the world could ferret out all the possible misspellings without a table of collected spelling errors which is specific to your industry.

I believe there are medical dictionaries which probably do contain most of the words you're likely to encounter. Even so, if you could build a table from such a dictionary, the question remains; how would you match a misspelled word (or words) to an entry (or entries) in that table? You could get close, perhaps - if you had a generation to work on it.

Then there are the terms which are new, obscure or trademarked names which simply do not appear in any dictionary yet, or may never...

I really don't see a way out for you. You 'could' start building a database of misspellings (along with their correctly spelled counterparts) for eventual use in a procedure which filters and reports them for you.

On second thought, such a major endeavor as this I would want to keep for meself, so that I might market it. Heh heh.

 

[FloBob]

Thanks... I think.. Welp what I will probably have to do is find some kinda of table dictionary thats out there and develop my own spelling module... I dont think it would be aweful hard, just pull a string out and pars it by spaces then test the words back to your table, if its not in the db then add it to an array. Not sure though I will have to figure out the specifics and make sure that there are no speed issues which im sure there will be if the database was not local. I was really looking for a built in feature that might just tell me how many mispelled words there are. I dont really care about the medical words because I can just build a feature to add in any words that the system does not understand as an option to the user.. Then the table should update itself , like MS words. Thank you though let me know if you have any other ideas on this.

 

[Shep]

I reread your original post more carefully.

If...and this is a big IF...there are methods and properties available in the Word Object Library for identifying and manipulating suspect words, could you not pass the text of their claim through Word's spellchecking feature, then collect and store the suspects in a table? Then it would be a simple matter to generate the report you'd like to give your client for spelling corrections. I would be willing to bet that methods do exist.

By suspect words, I mean the words which Word's spellchecker will underline red. I'm pretty sure you know the ins and outs there, I just want to make sure I'm being clear.

It's another world, delving into that object library. There is an object viewer in Word itself. Finding documentation might be a little difficult. I think I have some docs, let me know if you're interested in exploring this possibility and I'll look for them.

 

[Shep]

I took a look at the VB Reference Library for Word.

Some items of interest here...

GetSpellingSuggestions Method
SpellingChecked Property
SpellingDictionaryType Property
SpellingErrors Property
SpellingErrorType Property

Aha..
Word collects these already:
ProofreadingErrors Collection (A collection of spelling and grammatical errors for the specified document or range)

They are indexed, as well:
SpellingErrors(index)

You can loop through the collection to generate a list.

 

[FloBob]

These are all word features though... I would have to move the data to word to grab this information?

 

[Shep]

Yes, but with the methods available, you can automate the entire process from within Access...or any of the Office Suite, for that matter.

Time consuming, no doubt, though I suppose it would be much less painful than creating your own dictionary to compare your text against.