Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated January 28, 2023)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Excel in Microsoft 365
Vanita has a worksheet that contains different combinations of letters in each cell of column A. He is looking for a way to extract the words from that list that are "proper," meaning that they are found in a spell-check dictionary.
Assuming that the column contains only words (no spaces, punctuation, or phrases), you can manually check the list in this manner:
If you need to perform the validation process regularly, you may want to use a macro to instead create your final list. The following macro steps through the word list in column A and clears any cells that contain words not in the dictionary. After checking all the words, it then deletes all the cleared cells.
Sub ExtractDictionaryWords() Dim rWords As Range Dim rCell As Range Application.ScreenUpdating = False Set rWords = Range(Range("A1"), _ Range("A1048576").End(xlUp)) For Each rCell In rWords If Not Application.CheckSpelling(rCell.Value) Then rCell.Clear End If Next On Error Resume Next rWords.SpecialCells(xlCellTypeBlanks). _ Delete (xlShiftUp) On Error GoTo 0 Set rCell = Nothing Set rWords = Nothing Application.ScreenUpdating = True End Sub
Remember—this macro is intentionally destructive in its behavior, meaning that it clears out cells. If you have any need for the original data, you'll want to run the macro on a copy of the data, not on your only copy.
Note:
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11284) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Excel in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Extracting Proper Words.
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