Bypassing URL Scanning in Microsoft Office’s Spellcheck: A Step-by-Step Guide

If you write documents containing a lot of URLs, it can get annoying when the spell check in Word questions almost every one. You can save yourself a bit of time and frustration by telling Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to ignore URLs in your documents when performing a spell check.

We’ll use Microsoft Word as an example, but the process is the same in each Office program. To ignore URLs when you run a spell check, click the “File” tab.

On the backstage screen, click “Options” in the list of items on the left.

The Word Options dialog box displays. Click “Proofing” in the list of items on the left.

In the “When correcting spelling in Microsoft Office programs” section, check the “Ignore Internet and file addresses” box.

NOTE: A file address is an address to a local file on your computer that starts with “file://”, for example, file:///C:/Users/Lori/Documents/Notes/Sample%20Notes.pdf.

Click “OK”.

Now, Word will ignore anything it recognizes as a website URL or file address when you run a spell check on a document.

Again, the “Ignore Internet and file addresses” option is also available in other Microsoft Office programs that have spell check available, such as Excel and PowerPoint. But turning it on in one Office program does not turn it on in the others, so you must turn it on in each program separately.

Related: How to Limit Spell Checking to the Main Dictionary Only in Word

You can also exclude certain words from the spell check in Word as well as limit the spell check to only use the main dictionary .