Updated January 19, 2019
The Problem
Pages for ios has been vastly improved in recent years, and it has become my go-to app for creating layouts that I use as illustrations on my websites and YouTube Channel. It’s also my go-to app for more traditional word processing…but I don’t have much call for that these days. I mainly use a combination of Apple Notes and Evernote for most of my text editing tasks, which I wrote a lot more about in my recent post comparing the two.
But there’s one annoying characteristic of Pages…and in fact it occurs across the board with all of Apple apps for ios…misspelled words are underlined in red.
This feature is particularly bothersome because it’s applied to names too. Since I write a lot about apps, devices and things with names that aren’t in most standard dictionary’s, much of what I write about falls into a vast category that Apple identifies as Misspellings.
99% of the time the ‘misspelled ‘ identification is wrong!
See my most recent example of when this occurred below:
Contributing Factors
This wouldn’t be a problem if you could add personal names to a custom dictionary…most word processors let you do this. In fact Pages on a Mac computer lets you do this. Pages on a Mac also lets you ignore a spell check suggestion. But you can’t do this using Pages on ios devices!
What can you do…especially if you’re creating layouts that you intend on taking screenshots of?
The Solution
The Solution, while not sophisticated, at least solves the problem for my purposes…it just removes the annoying red lines under the names of the things that I’m writing about. The solution is to turn Spell Check off completely.
Here are the steps for turning off Spell Check (you can refer to the screenshot above for an example):
- Tap on the three small dots in the upper right hand corner of the screen – this takes you to Settings for Pages
- Scroll down until you see ‘Check Spelling‘
- Tap on the green slider switch which should be in the ‘on’ position currently…so that it switches to ‘off.’ You’ll know it’s done correctly when you no longer see any green.
Instantaneously…any red lines that were displayed should disappear!
Updated Information for ios 12
The steps for ios 12 (and possibly 11) are a little different. After tapping on the 3 dots look down in the menu for Settings – AutoCorrection. Turn off Check Spelling. See the screenshot below.
How to Let Apple Know That You Want This Fixed
If you’re still annoyed at the lack of control you have using Pages in ios, you can go to the App Store and write a User review mentioning this problem. The developers rely on these reviews a lot for future enhancements, so the more people that write this in as a suggestion, the better the chances are that this will be fixed someday soon!
How to Turn Spell Check Off Completely in ios 10*
If you want to turn off Spell Check universally for your whole iPad …you can do so in Settings – General – Keyboard – Under the section that says ‘English‘ you’ll find Spell Check which can be set to on or off.
I found a great article giving you the above directions in a step-by-step fashion here. And I made a PDF of the steps you can download here.
You may be amused to learn that I struggle to correctly spell the word ‘misspelled’! I can’t explain it but the correct spelling just looks wrong to me! I personally think it should be ‘mispelled’…which just looks right! This tells me that I’ve probably been misspelling this word my entire life!
*This is still pretty much the same in later versions of ios.
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