IESpell is an Internet Explorer extension that can perform spelling checks on all text inside Internet Explorer user-input forms.
Although it runs locally on your hard drive and can be used offline, it can provide instant, context-menu based word/reference lookups from online resources.
Do you create a lot of text/content straight from the browser: do you use a webmail service such as Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoomail? Do you have a blog that you update and work with straight from the browser? If so, IESpell can provide spelling checking functionality for everything you do online using Internet Explorer.
Here are some notes on this program:
- Clean, competent user interface.
- Note that the spelling checking function works only inside IE forms. You cannot highlight and spellcheck just any block of text on any webpage, although you can use the reference lookup functions from just about anywhere (see below).
- It’s fast. Because it is local, it will be much faster than any resource that may be available online within your online application.
- Works with IE-based browsers. For these, IESpell can be used through the context menu. For Internet Explorer it can be accessed from the toolbar and file menu as well.
- You can enter custom additions to the words database. The IESpell website suggests that you use the same custom file as that for MS Office, which will enable you to access the words you previously added to the MS Office spelling checker, as well as make any additions you make with IESpell available within Office.
- You can look up a word’s meaning through the context menu on-the-fly from online resources such as Merriam Webster. You can even launch a Wikipedia search for any highlighted word by right-click ’search Wikipedia’. Oh, and you can do this anywhere on the page; you do not have to be inside a form.
- Want to search an online resource that is not pre-defined? No problem – you can easily add one.
- Quality of suggested spellings is very high.
- Application developer’s can have access to the API, allowing them to use and integrate IESpell within their applications.
This is a very competent little program that works very well. It is probably a better choice that a global spelling checking program (such as Freespell) if you do most of your text-creation in IE and your Word processing software already contain a spellchecker. This program brings IE up to speed with Firefox (which has built in spelling check) and I recommend it highly.
Version tested: v2.5.1 (build 106)
Compatibility: Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP; Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher.
Go to the download page to get the latest version (approx 1.96 megs). The program home page.
