OneDrive / SkyDrive and Office spelling

How to update Microsoft Office with the new name, OneDrive, and remove the old SkyDrive name.

Recent versions of Office have the name SkyDrive (with the extra capital letter) in the supplied dictionary. However the new OneDrive name hasn’t made it to the Office dictionary yet.

Here’s what you’ll see in a default Word 2013 with US English dictionary:

If you want to fix the spellings and encourage use of the new name, change both the custom dictionary and the exclusion dictionary.

Adding to the custom dictionary is easy. Type in OneDrive then right click and choose ‘Add to Dictionary’. Or go to File | Options | Proofing | Custom Dictionaries and add to the word list. Network Administrators can add the name to a shared custom dictionary.

The exclusion dictionary is a little more tricky because it’s not accessible from Office options. We have full instructions in a separate article on Removing words from the Microsoft Office dictionary. In the exclusion list add the word ‘skydrive’ all in lower case.

This is a good example of how the custom and exclusion dictionaries in Office are ‘behind the times’ and need improvement to meet the needs of organizations in the 21^st Century. Office should have options for comments to accompany custom and exclusion dictionary entries. In this case the comments could appear as tooltips to explain why SkyDrive has a red squiggly line and to use OneDrive instead. The OneDrive addition can have a note to explain when and why it was added.

See Also

• Removing words from the Word dictionary
• Why is an eighth grader smarter than Microsoft Word?