Spellcheck Not Working for Some Words?

You’re right—words like Manila, Asia, and Santiago do seem obvious, so it’s frustrating when spellcheck doesn’t flag them.

What you’re experiencing is actually a known behavior in many spellcheckers (including Excel and Word): they often ignore fully capitalized words or words that start with a capital letter, assuming they are proper nouns (like names of people, places, or brands). Since your misspellings are in a column labeled Region and Sub-Region and start with capital letters (e.g., Aisa, Manilla, Santigo), the spellchecker likely treated them as intentional names and skipped them.

This can be helpful in some contexts (avoiding false positives on legitimate names) but clearly causes issues when proper names are actually misspelled.

How to prevent or catch this in the future:

 1. Adjust spellcheck settings (in Excel/Word):

• Go to File > Options > Proofing
• Uncheck “Ignore words in UPPERCASE” and/or “Ignore words that contain numbers”
• Note: This may increase false positives, but it will flag those capitalized misspellings.

 2. Use Data Validation (recommended for your workbook) - As mathetes thoughtfully suggested, this is often the most reliable approach for terms you use frequently. You can create a master list of correct region/sub-region names (e.g., Asia, Manila, Santiago, Tangier) and then apply Data Validation as a dropdown list in your worksheet. This prevents typos from being entered in the first place and is much more dependable than spellcheck for proper nouns.

 3. Run a manual check on proper nouns as a final step:

• Sort the column alphabetically and scan visually, or use a formula like =A1<>B1 if you have a correction reference list.

You’re absolutely right to want accurate place names, and your approach is thoughtful. 

My answers are voluntary and without guarantee!

Hope this will help you.

My hypothesis, based partly on experience, was that Spell check assumes capitalized words are names, and names can have idiosyncratic spellings, so it often--but not always--leaves them as entered.

Indeed, I did what you can also do and Googled the question (ChatGPT and Claude would be alternatives) and confirmed that hypothesis. One answer, in fact, went so far as to just acknowledge you're best off by "manually" checking all names. You'll also see that though there are some setting that can prompt Word and Excel to check capitalized words, doing so often leads to false positives.

If these are names of regions, sub-regions, cities you often use, I would suggest that you'd be best served by using Data Validation for the ones you need, rather than relying on spell-check to do the validation.