Depending on your Microsoft PowerPoint 2003 configuration, as you add text to a presentation, if you misspell a word or type in a word that PowerPoint does not recognize, a squiggly line will appear below said word. You can right-click the word to choose a word that PowerPoint thinks is one with correct spelling, or click "Ignore All" to ignore checking the word you typed.

The advantage to automatic spell-checking is obvious; instead of manually having to spell-check presentations, you can rely (to some degree) on PowerPoint doing this for you.

However, there are two disadvantages to automatic spell-checking:

1. If you are typing in a long series of text, the red squiggly lines may distract you. Perhaps you only want to check spelling after typing in all your text.

2. Especially in larger presentations, it may take a while for PowerPoint to spell-check the entire document. During this time your computer may run slightly slower than normal. Also, if you are using a laptop to develop a presentation and it is not plugged-in, any background processes such as spell-checking a document will increase the need for battery power.

To enable or disable automatic spell-checking of a PowerPoint 2003 presentation, do the following:

1. Click "Tools" - "Options".

2. When the "Options" multi-tabbed dialog box appears, select the "Spelling and Style" tab.

3. Check or uncheck "Check spelling as you types" as desired.

4. Click "OK" to close the dialog box.

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