The Case of the Missing Spell Checker

A recent project involved creating a proof-of-concept SharePoint 2010 Foundation site(s) for a client. The aim was to demonstrate some of SharePoint’s collaboration features and show how the platform could support various teams within the client’s organization. In setting up the demonstration, we decided to create a small Knowledge Base using the built in content creation tools.

The new page editing tools are certainly easier to use than in previous versions of SharePoint and adding in pictures is a cinch. The range of styles and fonts is also much improved. We did think the mechanism for linking pages – while very wiki-like – could have been made easier for less tech-savvy users. More importantly, since Foundation users do not get the content management and tagging features of the Standard and Enterprise versions, better tools for organizing the pages – other than simple links – would have been helpful. For example, it would have been nice to have been able to designate one of the pages as the “Home Page” of the Knowledge Base. Another great feature would have been to have an “Index Page” with an automatically created index of pages in the wiki.

SharePoint 2010 Foundation Content Editor: Insert Options

SharePoint 2010 Foundation : Text Editing Options

It wasn’t until someone pointed out a glaring spelling error in the copy we’d been writing for the Knowledge Base that we realized that, most strangely, there wasn’t any form of spell checker in the content editor. At first we thought we’d simply mislaid it somewhere in the ribbon but after looking high and low for it and checking several blogs, we realized that it in fact doesn’t exist in Foundation. Microsoft skirt round the issue by declaring that spell checking exists in Standard and Enterprise, thereby carefully not saying that it doesn’t exist in Foundation.

This seems to us very strange and a significant drawback to Foundation (which is almost certain to be the de facto hosted version). After all, blog platforms and software like Blogger - on which ChromaScope is hosted - have incorporated spell checkers for some time now.

Blogger's Editing Options (Spell Check is the last icon on the right)

Intrigued, we decided to do a quick comparison of functionality between the HTML editors in Blogger and SharePoint 2010.

Feature	Blogger	SharePoint 2010 Foundation
Cut/Copy/Paste	Yes	Yes
Font Styles	Yes (7 available)	Yes  (13 available)
Font Color	Yes (limited range)	Yes (extensive range)
Strike-through/SuperScript/Subscript	Strike-through only	Yes
Highlight Text	Yes	Yes
Paragraph Formatting (e.g. justification)	Yes	Yes
Style Gallery (e.g. Byline)	Quote only	Yes (7 available)
MarkUp Style Gallery (e.g. Heading1)	Title and Body only (from blog content editor).	Yes (14 available)
Text Layout (e.g. columns)	Yes but through Page Design rather than content editor.	Yes
Insert Picture/Image	Yes	Yes
Insert Video	Yes	Yes (but not as obvious how to do this)
Insert Link	Yes	Yes
Insert Jump Break	Yes	No
Insert Table	No	Yes
Select Elements based on HTML tag	No	Yes
CheckIn/CheckOut	No (but the publish function enables users to decide when pages become publically available.)	Yes
Tagging	Yes	No
Edit HTML Source	Yes	Yes
Page Templating	Yes	Yes but by using SharePoint Designer
Language Support	Yes including non-latin	Extensive including non-latin
Spell Checking	Yes	No

While overall, SharePoint 2010 Foundation has a very rich content editor, some of the features and the rather technical HTML element orientation may make it difficult for the general user or, more likely, simply languish unused. Blogger, on the other hand, with the exception of the option of easily adding a table, has all the features the general user/content creator would need to compose content AND a spell checker! Hopefully Microsoft take note of the feedback that we, and we are sure everyone else, will give them and make the text editor in SharePoint 2010 Foundation more like an easy-to-use content editor and less like an HTML editor for web designers.