I ran across an issue today in Microsoft Word 2007 where the text inside my tables was noticeably not being spell check (i.e., words like aaa or woords were not considered misspelled). To make a long story short, it turns out that the style used for the text had spell checking turned off. This is a little known option located in a misplaced location. The location is the Language Window which is, in my opinion, mismatched as I do not think of spelling as a property belonging to language options but as a property belonging to the paragraph of text (working within the list presented by the context or second mouse button click menu). Furthermore the Language Window cannot be directly called from the text’s context menu but only from the text style’s context menu.

To see if this solves to your spell check situation try these steps:

From the text’s style:

1. Second mouse button click on the text style used inside the table (the highlight style either listed in the Style section of the Home Ribbon tab or from the expanded Style list
2. Click on the Modify… option  (opens Modify Style Window)
3. Click the Format button (bottom left corner)
4. Click on the Language… option (opens Language Window)
5. Uncheck “Do not check spelling or grammer” checkbox.
6. Click Ok, Click Ok (exit Language and Modify Style Windows)
7. Click Office Button (round upper left bottom)
8. Click on the Word Options option (opens Word Options Window)
9. Choose Proofing tab (side bar)
10. Click Recheck Document button
11. Click Ok (exit Word Options Window)

If this was the cause of your spell check problem the text will now be spell check!

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“[papers] typically have no more than 8 tables and/or figures and a reference section of no more than 1,500 words.”

So let’s follow this logic…

• These instructions use the word “typically”, meaning “on average” or “normally”.
• “typically” is not a limit or a max, but an average, which means some papers are more and some are less.
• We submitted a paper with 13 tables and figures so we were more than average by 5, but some HFES  papers I have read only have 3 figure/tables, which is less by 5.
• However, our paper is unsubmitted because it “exceeds the recommended figure/table count.”
• However, recommended means a suggested or endorsed position, not a limit or a requirement.
• Therefore, our paper was unsubmitted because we did not follow their suggestion on keeping the table/figure count to more than an “average”?

Does anyone else see this funny logic? And this is supposed to be a journal on how to make this better for humans and this submission process is desperately in need of some human factors!

Take home lesson:

If you are going to put a limit such that things beyond the limit are not acceptable then you need to explicitly say so! If HFES had stated on their instruction page that papers typically have X table/figures and cannot exceed Y table/figures, then we would have written our paper with less than Y table/figures and all would be well. Instead, I have to rewrite parts of the paper to remove 6 figures because we are guessing that 8 is the limit.

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Out of Space? Yes, yes I am…

One day I wanted to see where all my space was being used and I found this great open source program: WinDirStat. Below is a shapshot of my hard drive usage with WinDirStat. I’ve also used it on our home PC to find everywhere we had backup our pictures using this color coding for files types (way cool). The User directory is large because I have over 4GB of Vanderbilt papers, projects, with 2GB for my Ph.D. Thesis directory. Well it looks like the problem is that I just need a bigger hard drive or a new laptop . However, it will have to wait until after I start my post-Ph.D. job.

Snapshot of my hard drive usage with WinDirStat

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