Spell-Checking Your Estimates With Landscape Management Network

Spell-checking your work can and will make a difference in the eyes of your customer. Spelling – in every presentation you make to potential customers – makes a difference, but especially on an estimate.  An estimate is your ‘final presentation’ – the very last thing you leave in your customers’ mind before asking them to invest their hard earned money in your company.  Consider the final impressions poor spelling leaves in the minds’ of your customers:

• We don’t double-check our work for quality
• Accuracy and professionalism aren’t very important
• We rush our work
• The sale of this job isn’t important enough for us to take the extra 5 minutes to ensure we’re putting out our best work
• I don’t care about the ‘right’ way to do things

Spell Checking Using Google Chrome

First, make sure your Google Chrome spell-checking option is turned on.  You find instructions on how to do this here:  http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95604

After you finish typing a word (you must hit space or enter after the word), Chrome will automatically run a spell-check on this word.  If Chrome does not recognize the word, it will underline the word with a red underline.  The red indicates a potential spelling error.  

To get suggestions on how to fix the error, right-click the word and a list of suggested words will appear.

If a suggestion matches the word you want(ed) to type, then click the selected word.  If not, then you can re-type the word manually until you get the spelling correct.

Some words are spelled accurately, but are not recognized by spell-checkers.  To add a commonly used word (that is not recognized) to your dictionary, you can right-click the word and click the option to Add to Dictionary.

Spell Checking Using Mozilla Firefox

Spell-checking in Firefox is automatically activated, but in case it’s not working, here are the instructions to activate Firefox’s built-in spell-checker.  http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Using%20the%20spell%20checker

Once spell-check is activated in Firefox, the instructions are exactly the same as described above for Google Chrome.

Spell Checking Using Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer is one of the only major browsers not to include a built-in spell checker.  This is why many users don’t even realize they can do spell-checking through their browser.  You have two choices if you want to enable spell-checking as an IE user.

1. You can switch to either Firefox or Google Chrome (both are free)
2. Install Speckie, and add-on for Internet Explorer that will enable you to use IE and continue spell-checking.  You can install Speckie here:   http://www.speckie.com/dload/

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