My organisation has recently published a lengthy document explaining our new house style and branding. I am looking for a way to check whether Word 2016 documents comply with the guidelines.
I realise I can deal with rules about fonts and visual styling through templates, perhaps using restricted editing to force style usage. I can also deal with some of the rules on punctuation by using the configuration options for the grammar checker.
What I am after is some way of checking for rules that aren't currently built in to the grammar checker, e.g.
- Prefer the word 'people' rather than 'staff'.
- Only allow an ampersand (&) in an acronym or name.
- Write numbers below 10 in words and above 10 in figures.
- Don't allow URLs to be written in text.
Ideally I would like some way of customising the spelling and/or grammar checker to allow it to test rules like these. Other solutions would be acceptable, but I want to be able to see where there are problems and decide how to correct them, rather than have them automatically corrected (as the rules will not always be appropriate).
Is this possible? How else could I do this?
Solutions that use VBA are fine, but I don't have admin privileges and can't install any additional applications, plug-ins or scripts. Solutions that use external websites would work, but would be less preferable due to confidentiality issues.
It would be a further bonus if there was a way of packaging or automating the customisation, so that once I had got it working, I could easily share the set-up with other users.
EDIT: As a partial solution, I've found how I can flag non-preferred words as spelling mistakes, using an exclusion dictionary. I haven't figure out how to make Word suggest the preferred alternative without using Autocorrect though.
