Do you spend a lot of time checking Word documents for formatting issues or placeholders that haven't been filled? Our Smart Check feature looks for and corrects common errors in your Word files for you.
Checking your file
- Press Smart Check on the UpSlide toolbar
- In the pane that opens, press Analyse (in the top left)
- Your document will be scanned and will produce a list of potential warnings organized by categories
- Click on a warning to have the error highlighted in your document
- Optional: click the Fix button to make the suggested change
Settings
- To change the errors Smart Check looks for, use the dropdown on the Smart Check button.
- French or English language documents and errors are supported.
Punctuation checks
Double spaces: Two consecutive space characters. To allow for manual spacing, no warning is shown if more than two consecutive spaces are found.
Commas: Each comma is checked it is (A) not preceded by a space and (B) followed by a space.
Semicolons and colons: In English they must not be preceded by a space and they must be followed by a space. In French they must be preceded by a space.
Exclamation and question marks: In English they must be preceded by a non-breaking space and followed by a space. In French they must be preceded by a space.
Parenthesis and brackets: Opening character must be preceded by a space. Closing characters must be followed by one.
Quotes: Opening quotes must be followed by a non-breaking space and preceded by a standard one, while closing quotes function symmetrically. Any isolated quote will also generate a warning.
Full Stops: UpSlide will generate a warning if a full stop is preceded by a space or not followed by one.
Punctuation check exceptions: To avoid getting too many unjustified warnings, UpSlide makes the following exceptions:
- Full stops not followed by a space but preceded by an uppercase letter are allowed to avoid generating a warning when acronyms are used such as U.S.A..
- Full stops followed by a lowercase letter are ignored to avoid generating warnings each time a web address is used.
- The first word of each paragraph is ignored to avoid full stop warnings on section numbers.
- Punctuation characters associated with numbers (such as 1.1) are also ignored to avoid conflicts between punctuation warnings and number format warnings (see below).
Number format checks
UpSlide analyses all of your document numbers to ensure that they are formatted as:
- 1 000 000,11 in French or;
- 1,000,000.11 in English
UpSlide checks whether the decimal and thousand separator match the selected language. It screens the document for any chain of characters containing only numbers and separators (spaces, commas, dots or non-breaking spaces) that satisfy the following constraints:
- contains at least one separator
- several separators are present and are separated by exactly 3 numbers
If it fails to satisfy one of these constraints it will not generate any warning even if it does not use the standard decimal and thousand separators. This avoids generating warnings for dates, section numbers, reference to legal text, etc. Examples with English conventions:
- 2,22 will become 2.22
- 1000 000 will become 1,000,000
- 1 000 000,45 will be corrected to 1,000,000.45
Number format check exceptions: To avoid getting too many unjustified warnings, UpSlide makes the following exceptions:
- In case of doubt between a decimal number and an integer, UpSlide chooses the integer. For example: 300.100 will be formatted as 300 100 in French.
- To avoid conflict with text exported from Excel and with cross references all text contained in fields is ignored. For example: "see Section 3.2" does not raise a warning.