Spellcheck a single word in Excel function

Question

This little Excel VBA function always returns false, no what word is passed in.

Function SpellCheck(SomeWord As String)

SpellCheck = Application.CheckSpelling(SomeWord)

End Function

In fact, in the IDE I can verify that Application.CheckSpelling("hello") fails, though the Excel spellchecker does detect misspellings.

What I'm trying to do is get a T/F value for each word if it is spelled correctly.

Answer 1

Like I mentioned in my comment it works.

Option Explicit

Sub Sample()
    MsgBox SpellCheck("hello") '<~~ Returns True
    MsgBox SpellCheck("daasd") '<~~ Returns False
End Sub

Function SpellCheck(SomeWord As String) As Boolean
    SpellCheck = Application.CheckSpelling(SomeWord)
End Function

Application.CheckSpelling will not correct or offer to correct a misspelled word, it only returns True or False

I tested

?Application.CheckSpelling("hello")

in immediate window and it returned True

EDIT: Calling Application.CheckSpelling from UDF would always return False. Last time I checked, it was still a bug and there was no way around it. If there is a recent update on that then I am not aware of it. :)

MORE EDIT

Here is your function slightly modified which will work as a UDF as well :)

Got the idea from this link

Function SpellCheck(rng As Range) As Boolean
    Dim oxlAp As Object
    Set oxlAp = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
    SpellCheck = oxlAp.CheckSpelling(rng.Value)
    oxlAp.Quit
    Set oxlAp = Nothing
End Function

Answer 2

One pitfall to watch out for is that Application.CheckSpelling will return True for any text that has a character outside the codepage of the language for which you do the spellchecking.

For instance, checking nő in English returns True. Apparently Excel hasn't yet (as of version 2010) fully arrived in the Unicode world.

If that's a problem in your application, you either have to screen out text with characters outside the codepage beforehand, or you can borrow Word's spellchecking function, which doesn't have this bug, for instance like this (adapted from www.vb-tec.de):

    Public Function CheckSpellingWd( _
            ByRef Text As String, _
            Optional ByVal IgnoreUpperCase As Boolean = False, _
            Optional ByVal ReUse As Boolean = True _
        ) As Boolean

        'Reuse Word object on next call
        Static wd As Word.Application

        If Len(Text) > 0 Then
            'create Word object on first call
            If wd Is Nothing Then
            Set wd = New Word.Application
            wd.DisplayAlerts = wdAlertsNone
            End If

            'Do spellcheck
            CheckSpellingWd = wd.CheckSpelling(Text, , IgnoreUpperCase)
        Else
            'Return True on empty string
            CheckSpellingWd = True
        End If
    End Function

Now Unicode is checked fine, and in theory, you can provide a dictionary file path as a parameter to the CheckSpelling function to check in any language you have a dictionary file for:

Application.CheckSpelling(Word, CustomDictionary, IgnoreUppercase, MainDictionary, _
    CustomDictionary2, CustomDictionary3, CustomDictionary4, CustomDictionary5, _
    CustomDictionary6, CustomDictionary7, CustomDictionary8, CustomDictionary9, _
    CustomDictionary10)

In reality however the check is done using the main dictionary of the default language (as set in File/Options/Language) regardless of the dictionary you specify (checked in Word 2010, not sure about previous versions). You can only change that setting manually (and have to restart Word for the change to come into effect).

The default language setting is governed by a registry key. In Office 2010:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\LanguageResources\InstallLanguage

So in theory, you could automate the language change as well using VBA wrappers to Windows Scripting, WMI or WinAPI to change the registry (and then restart Word), but on Windows 7 with UAC enabled I ran into permission problems, and this is where I gave up on the experiment. I only tried the WinAPI route though.