Forum Discussion
Spell check not working on Microsoft Teams desktop
Dear jharmon , hope you are doing well.
I had the same problem - i.e. spell check is not working in teams. I deleted the content of the C:\Users\appdata\roaming\Microsoft\teams\dictionaries folder, restarted Teams, but the issue persisted.
This is how I solved the problem:
# I opened the log.txt file located in "C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Teams" folder.
# I found the following error "error -- spellCheckerService initialization failed: Message: es-419 is not a valid language code"
Which means es-49 (Spanish - Latin America) is not supported by the spellCheckerService.
# I removed Spanish - Latin America configuration from the preferred languages in Windows (I am using Windows 10): Windows Settings -> Time & Language -> Language -> Preferred Languages
# Restarted the computer (just to be on the safe side)
# Logged in on Teams --> and it worked.
Note: English-US is the default language in my computer. Yet, Teams tried to set the Spell Check service to Spanish Latin America for some reason.
Note2: In your case, the spellCheckerService may be trying to initialize using a different language.
Hope it helps,
-F
My issues were correct words being marked as misspelled and few correct suggestions for other misspelled words. But reading your post helped point me in the right direction, and maybe it could resolve your issue as well.
I went to C:\Users\<USERPROFILE>\appdata\roaming\Microsoft\teams\dictionaries as you mentioned and hoped there was a way to get a better dictionary file. All research said no way to update what comes with Teams. But when I tried to find more about *.bdic files in general I discovered that it is the format created by google for the chrome browser. Since deleting the old one does not harm Teams because it can just regenerate a new one, I figured what harm could it do to use my chrome one. Copied the chrome one into the teams folder and renamed it to the Teams name and voila! My misspelled words now have correct suggestions and my correctly spelled words are showing as correctly spelled. path to other dictioanry file is: C:\Users\<USERPROFILE>\appdata\roaming\chrome\data\ (look for the *.bdic file)
Not the same thing as you, I know, but I thought it could be related or help anyone else who lands here in their search for spell check problems.
AndrewClark thanks for the inputs. I had exactly the same issue as you have described in your post. Instead of copying chrome's dictionary *.bdic file, what I did was, just took a backup of these files (for some reasons I had 2 files) and deleted them from C:\Users\{your user}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Teams\Dictionaries.
As soon I restarted teams again, it auto generated a fresh file and the error was gone. But your method did the trick and now I get proper suggestions.
Thank you.
Hridesh Hello! I opened the C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Teams\dictionaries and i even do not have English dictionary there.
- My colleagues and I are having issues with the spell check in Teams. The issue being that it is enabled in the settings but still doesn't work. I have tried the 'remove the tick and add it again' trick but didn't work. I also saw something that said to delete the 'US.bdic file' which I did but it also didn't work. Is there anything else that can be done?
From a very stressed bad speller...
AndrewClark Thanks for the great lead on changing dictionaries!
In my case I found all the en-US-?-?.bdic google dictionaries here:
%LocalAppData%\Google\Chrome\User Data
and all the teams dictionaries here:
%AppData%\Microsoft\Teams\dictionaries
Also I found the dictionaries can be edited
https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/editing-the-spell-checking-dictionariesWhether there is a dictionary file or not seems to make no difference. If you completely uninstall and reinstall Teams, it does not even create a Dictionary folder and yet, spell check works. Then it mysteriously stops working. Also, if you reinstall Teams, the spell check works but if you reboot your computer, it stops working. Even if you delete the entire %AppData%\Microsoft\Teams folder and restart Teams, spell check still doesn't work.
- My spellcheck works except if I type "teh" instead of "the". There isn't a dictionary either. the only thing I can think of is in Word, I set "teh" to autocorrect to "the", but I wouldn't think that should make a difference since Teams doesn't have that autocorrect option.
AndrewClark I just deleted the file located at C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Teams\dictionaries\en-US.bdic and restarted Teams.. all is well
