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For the most part, I've been very happy with the spell checker and thesaurus (synonym) features of Office. One thing I'd like to see, tho, is the ability to spell check and/or lookup synonyms/antonyms from any application. This could be done using a global shortcut that would spell check based on what's in the clipboard or just open a window where you could copy/paste in what you want to check. There are various add-ons and extensions that will add this capability to browsers and other tools, but I want one dictionary/thesaurus that's global. I can see this going into Office or Windows; either way, I'd be happy. If you want this to be provided to everyone, put it in Windows; otherwise, put it in Office. I'm thinking of Word's spell checker and thesaurus shortcuts are F7 and Shift-F7, so I'm thinking Win-F7 and Win-Shift-F7 would be perfect.
There is a tool I found which does this, which was a partial inspiration to this suggestion, but I'd really like to see a global solution with a shared dictionary. Honestly, the clipboard may not be the best data source for this, but it's the only shared location I can think of that wouldn't reach into running applications to pull out data, which I'd see as a security risk.
In Word, when you right click on a word, there's a Synonyms submenu. This typically works great, but when you try to get a synonym of a plural word, the only option you have is to select the singular form of the word. From there you can right click again and select the synonym you want from the Synonyms submenu. Of course, your word is now singular, so you'll have to change it to the plural form. This seemingly easy task is now complicated because of an s. I'd like to see one of two things happen here. (A) Update the built-in thesaurus to understand plural forms of words; or, (B) instead of forcing the user to change the word to its singular form, make that selection a submenu with the related synonyms under it. I can only assume the former would be an easy update since they already know the difference between the singular and plural forms of the word. As for the latter, perhaps a picture would better describe what I'm talking about. On the left, you'll see what Word 2007 does when you right click on a plural word; on the right, you'll see my suggestion, where the singular form is a submenu.
Nearly every time I create a document that will have any significant amount of source code in it, I create Code and Inline Code styles. This allows me to easily format the code so that its easily discernable from the other text. Of course, the problem that plagues code in these files is that they're always being marked as spelling and/or grammar problems. I wish there were a checkbox within the style that would allow me to tell the spelling and grammar checkers to ignore it. That would be great. Heck, while I'm at it, the ability to parse the code would be even better. That way, if I fat-finger ToStirng(), I could be warned that it should be ToString(). I'd be in heaven with that! Well, maybe not, but at least one step closer.
I love the collapsable regions in Visual Studio and, while it may not seemingly fit in the word processing world, I'd like to see something similar. Specifically, I'd like to be able to collapse list items. For instance, a lot of the documentation I create for projects will be numbered. As I finalize sections, I'd like to be able to collapse them down to their definitions, which would be much more concise. Obviously, this would be odd in the print view, which is default -- and the view I prefer, I might add -- but I think the ability would be nice, nonetheless.
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