Anyone using office 2004 for mac,please help!

Question

Dear all,
i know this is probably the wrong place for this post,but i've always been able to find my answers here..so genuine apologies in advance
i bought office 2004 for my macbook a few months back..i'm able to open word,excel etc no problems...but when i am typing in word on a regular document..my spellcheck does not work..even where there is obvious spelling problems,it does not highlight it with a red line underneath...when i run a spell chenck,it tells me its complete and the spelling and grammer are complete,when they are obviously not!!
in the compatibilty report it tells me that that word cannot identify text language...when i select language dialog box and english (uk)nothing changes
I've also just realised that when i type in a word notebook document,spell check works!?!??!
Anyone any ideas,i have a dissertation due for college in a few days and i need it to work!!!
again apologies if this is out of order posting here,
regards,
Paul

Answer 1

how do i uninstall office completely???
Before you do an uninstall you may want to test your preference files for corruption. There are three which can become corrupeted, but probably only the first two will be of issue.
Quit Word and any other Office Applciations.
Browse to your User home account and locate the following files:
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/com.microsoft.Word.prefs.plist
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist
(the third has to do with fonts and I don't think that is at issue)
Drag these to your desktop and relaunch Word. Word will re-create these files.
If all works as it should you can trash these files. You will probably have to reset some preferences and Autocorrect settings. Be careful of what you reset as that may have been the cause of the issue.
If this does not work you may replace the newly created files with the ones you dragged to the desktop, or you may try re-installing Office.
If you want to completely remove Office and attempt a re-install to see if it corrects the problem: The uninstaller is located in HD/Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Additional Tools/Remove Office.
I understand that you are in a timecrunch with your paper being due. I am sure with enough troubleshooting that you can and will find a solution to the Office problem. If the above steps do not work, however, you may also want to have a look at the free NeoOffice suite to get your paper done in the meantime.
http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php
I am not including the link as a means of trying to pawn off the problem as I think any problem is ultimately fixable, but it may give you an option to meeting your deadline.