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The Ampersand mystery in Microsoft Office

Word’s spell checker has some peculiar ideas about where an & symbol belongs.

Susan S. writes with a question about the Word spell checker. She’s noticed that an ampersand next to a letter doesn’t trigger a spelling error in Word.

We tried it out and she’s right:

Word - Smith ampersand Jones example.jpg image from The Ampersand mystery in Microsoft Office at Office-Watch.com

An ampersand next to a word is ‘OK’ for the Word spell checker. It’s only when there’s a word on both sides that an error is triggered.

It’s the same behavior in a range of languages including English (UK, US and Australian) plus French and Spanish.

Word has done this since at least Word 2003, probably before, but it’s hard to understand why.  Office for Mac behaves the same way.

Word - Ampersand test.jpg image from The Ampersand mystery in Microsoft Office at Office-Watch.com

An ampersand between two words with no spaces is an error and is showing correctly.

An ampersand between two single letters can be an error, it depends on your writing style. When initials are separated by ‘ & ‘ there may or may not be spaces. In the UK, people commonly see ‘M&S’ (for Marks and Spencer) while rural Aussies can type either ‘B&S’ or ‘ B & S ‘ (Bachelors and Spinsters).

But having an ampersand next to a solo letter or word is unusual and should trigger a spell check error in our view. At least we can’t think of a common situation where that combination is used.

Maybe it’s a bug in Word but it seems like something ‘by design’. If it’s a bug then it’s a long standing one which needs to be fixed. If it’s ‘by design’ it would be nice to know the reasoning.

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