Office v. Google Docs: When it comes to spell check, who reigns supreme? (editorial)

Staff Writer

Spell Check in Word 2014

I write these articles in OneNote. And I love it – it’s organized, clean, smooth, convenient, and more. However, some of the spell checking feels very rudimentary. So, I decided to do a study of the spell checks of Office for Desktop vs. Google Docs.

Office v. Docs

Clearly, Office is a lot better. Really, there was no point in continuing the study. Instead, I went to the Word Web App to see how that would fair. For those four words, it had the exact same suggestions as the Desktop version!

If you go on Gmail, or Chrome in general, there are much better spell check options for words. Additionally, the suggestions in the Google keyboard has very handful suggestions. So what is up with Google Docs?

Only Google can answer that – but they do need to step up their game. A useful spell check is needed for a useful writing experience. For example, if I wrote ‘teting’ I could easily be referring to ‘texting’ or ‘testing,’ and both options should show up when I right click to correct the word.

I was hoping that since these services are connected to the internet, choices would be smarter. They should be able to look at words around the sentence, if it’s a question or statement, etc. to decide what you meant to type. Hopefully in the future, they will be able to accomplish this, and in a way that doesn’t require uncomfortable data collection.

All that aside, if you were trying to choose between Office and Google Docs, this is another point in favor of Office.