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Office English dictionary update - when and how?

If there’s a common theme through Office Watch these days it’s the lack of disclosure by Microsoft about what they are doing with Office software.  One example is the apparently silent update to the English language dictionary in Office.

A few days ago we mentioned the addition to the English dictionary of words from the Game of Thrones franchise.  That’s somewhat trivial in itself but, when asked, Microsoft said they had added 12,000 words in 2014 and had been updating the English speller on a monthly basis during 2015.

But where and how are they doing that?

We searched high and low through all the Office 2013 updates for 2015 and could not find any mention of a dictionary update.  It seems that the English dictionary updates were bundled with some other fixes.

In desperation, we asked Microsoft to point us to the relevant updates.  They haven’t responded. Long experience has taught us that when Microsoft doesn’t reply that usually means they don’t know the answer or the answer is too embarrassing for the company!

Note:  checking Office updates isn’t easy and it’s quite possible we’ve overlooked something.  If you can find a mention of the Office 2013 English dictionary updates, please let us know.

What’s certain is that the dictionary updates weren’t separate nor marked as optional.

Mystery Updates

Along the way we found some badly undocumented Office updates.  For example https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2825678 which has not one word on what is fixed or changed with the update.  Customers can guess it’s something to do with Facebook if they dig deep and see that the updated file is Facebookprovider.dll

The main information (if you can call it that) is on the Windows Update | View update history.  For Office 2013 updates you’ll see the same ‘explanation’ for each update.

“Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Office 2013 64-Bit Edition. This update provides the latest fixes to Microsoft Office 2013 nn-Bit-edition.  Additionally, this update contains stability and performance improvements.”

That text is hardly ever true.  Rarely does an update include ‘fixes’ and ‘stability and performance improvements’.  The text is just ‘catch all’ text to cover all manner of updates.

To find out a little more, the ‘More information’ link might tell you something.

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