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Turn off spell checking in Teams
Is there any way to turn off spell check in Teams chat? Currently is seems to assume English, but I use Teams to communicate with people in different languages, so turning spell check off would perha...
Valgardur - assuming you are running the Windows Teams client, you can find the responsible settings.json file in USER\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Teams. The file comes with 3x "spellcheckerDisabled":false which can be replaced by "spellcheckerDisabled":true - and it does what is expected from name and value.
Unfortunately Teams will overwrite the setting back to false at next program shutdown since it seems to be a dynamic settings file. But if you mostly standby/hibernate your system with open programmes including Teams, the setting remains active, of course.
To be honest, this is a terrible thing by the developers. The setting is there for a long time already, but has never been published to the GUI.
Valgardur Just a heads up in case you've missed it.
MC217362, Stay Informed, Published date: Jun 26, 2020
Now, Microsoft Teams users can more easily communicate using multiple languages. Users who write different messages in different languages will now see spellchecking relevant to the language they're actively using when typing a message in the Microsoft Teams desktop app.
This is a key improvement to the existing Teams Desktop Spellchecking feature, to make it "language-aware" and improve the overall Messaging compose experience for bilingual & multilingual users around the world.
This message is associated with Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 65446
When this will happen
This improvement will start rolling out at the end of June and conclude by the end of July.
Note: that "language-aware spellchecking" will initially be available for the Windows Desktop client and the General (public cloud) only.
Support for Linux and Mac Desktop clients is under active investigation. Support for customers in the M365 Government clouds (GCC, GCC-H, DoD) is also under investigation.
How this will affect your organization
Now, spellchecking in Teams Desktop (Windows client only) will better support bilingual & multilingual users who write different messages in different languages.
Spellchecking will default to the active keyboard language, and if the user switches keyboard language, spellchecking will switch to that language. If a user writes enough messages in a different language in a given Chat or Channel conversation, spellchecking will automatically switch to the relevant language (in this case, a user may see a Compose notification UI letting them confirm/revert the switch).
Note:
- Message language auto-detection occurs client-side -- no typing/writing is sent to, processed by, or stored on any web server
- This spellchecking improvement addresses some of the key UserVoice feedback about proofing in Teams; support for users writing messages in different languages is a significant request by bilingual/multilingual users and organizations
What you need to do to prepare
This is an improvement to existing spellchecking in Teams Desktop and Spellchecking itself can be toggled on/off by users in Teams App Settings > General. You may consider updating your training and documentation as appropriate.
ChristianBergstrom I'm a data architect and talk database-ese. I hate having 50% or more of my typed words containing an ugly, garish, red underline to let me know I misspelled words like DTID. Forcing spellcheck was one of the worst decisions made about this app. Attributes like this make Teams feel like an alpha build.
- Hi Christian,
Couldn't resist a little snark huh? 🙂 I just found that they finally added the capability to turn it off. My point is, it never should’ve been released in the first place without the ability to turn it off.
Thanks,
Mike- Sorry, that wasn't my intention. But you replied to something I wrote almost a year ago. So from my point of view I didn't understand why not disabling it. Nothing else 🙂
- Hi, Christian, and thanks!
I'm actually looking for that option now because I was told MS Teams didn't have the alternative of turning off Spell Check. Can you tell me where you clipped that screenshot?
Best,
Tom- Hi Tom,
Just click on your picture and choose “Settings” a few lines down the page. The Settings window will pop up. At the bottom of the Settings window will be “Enable spell check”. Uncheck that and click “Restart”.
The good news: It actually turns it off and I also restarted Teams and it was still turned off.
Hope this helps,
Mike
