Now that you have been introduced to the exclude dictionary, here are the annoyances/drawbacks:

• The exclude dictionary is set per computer user and across all of Microsoft Office.  Thus, you can’t easily have a separate exclude dictionary for Client A and Client B, In-House Attorney A and In-House Attorney B, Partner A and Partner B, Inventor A and Inventor B, email versus “normal” documents, patent application versus office action response, or personal documents versus business documents (e.g., for practitioners that work from home). This is a major drawback to, for example, adding first person pronouns to the exclude dictionary.  While you may want them highlighted as misspelled when you are cutting and pasting from an invention disclosure form, they are appropriate to use in your Outlook email to a client.  It also means it is hard to institutionalize and automate the stylistic preferences of attorneys and inventors you regularly interact with.You can get around this limitation by having multiple exclude dictionary text files in the appropriate directory and copying the appropriate exclude dictionary to be Mssp3en.exc as needed and restarting your Microsoft Office applications.

• If you add too many words that you use frequently in documents to your exclude dictionary (e.g., words that you should use with caution), it often allows some really misspelled words to fall through the cracks when spell-checking.
• The exclude dictionary can only contain words not phrases.  Consequently, you cannot enter “prior art” to the exclude dictionary; you would need to add either “prior” or “art” to the exclude dictionary depending on which one you use less frequently.
• On a related note, there are no exceptions to when the words contained in an exclude dictionary are not marked as misspelled.  For example, you cannot fail to highlight the word “all” as misspelled when it is used in the phrase “some or all” or in the same sentence as “in one embodiment” (or words of similar effect).
• You will need to remember to backup your exclude dictionary (and for that matter your custom dictionary in the same directory).  Unlike client files that are usually stored on a shared drive or document management system, local configuration files are rarely backed up in a law firm.  My tip for getting around this annoyance is to use SyncToy to periodically copy the exclude dictionary to your firm’s shared drive — but more on that in a future post.

In the next few days, I will conclude the exclude dictionary series with a post about using similiar functionality in OpenOffice.