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  • Whitesmoke

    [rating:1/5]

    I am trying out “Whitesmoke”, a grammar checking program. So far I’m hating it. Although the online version works really well. The software that you install on your computer sucks. Windows 7 crashes when I try to install it. Mac works, but isn’t full featured and the design concept sucks. Highlight in Word and press F2. By the way, F2 is the default key for cutting text on Mac Word. So you have to undo that. Once you deal with that, it works. Your text is cut and pasted into the Whitesmoke app. It makes suggestions. One really annoying problem is that it marks all contractions as spelling errors. On the Mac there is next to nothing for settings. Not sure about Windows. Lastly, after you have made changes to the text, you click apply and your text is pasted back into Word. Unfortunately it doesn’t match your font. That sucks. Another thing that sucks is that you can only check 5000 characters at a time. This is a problem for novel length works. The online version let’s you do 10,000 characters which is a little better. I’ll keep working with the Whitesmoke support for awhile and see if they have any solutions for some of these issues. But so far this is looking pretty bad. I must say though, that the one thing it does do well is check grammar. I just wish it wasn’t such a total pain to use.