By Cyndie Shaffstall

At ThePowerXChange we tell our customers, if you have to spend more than half an hour doing any one thing, then someone else has already developed an XTensions® module so you don't have to do it again. Here are my seven favorite products to avoid the drudgery.

Spellbound, US$249
Mac/Windows

I have a long-standing dependency on Spellbound. This product has enabled me to create our product catalogues and spell check even the most diffcult and unusual spellings and, as unbelievable as it seems, capitalizations and inner punctuation — P.h.D., data2date, and XTensions are simple tasks for Spellbound.

Download a demo of Spellbound here: US Demo UK Demo

In addition to a US English dictionary, and a myriad of other dictionaries, for those of you using QuarkXPress® Passport, you'll have access to dozens of foreign-language auxiliary dictionaries as well. Special language dictionaries, such as medical, dental, pharmaceutical, and Wall Street words, and other language dictionaries are all handled using the Auxiliary Dictionaries feature.

Spellbound augments the QuarkXPress' spell-check features while checking the spelling of a single word, an active story, an entire document, or the text on master pages.

Spellbound can access up to five auxiliary dictionaries and provides an exception dictionary (this is useful for implementing house styles to ensure words are always spelled in a certain manner).

Spellbound has a few other invaluable features not found in QuarkXPress natively:

• a guesser,
• a phonetically based algorithm,
• spelling suggestion on constituent words when checking a compound word,
• replace a word with capitalization that differs from the typed format, and
• ligature support.

While the foreign-language dictionaries are a great feature, and especially useful to particular types of users, the many English additional dictionaries are not to be overlooked. There's a little something for everyone: biochemistry, geographical, dental, technical, legal, medical, pharmaceutical, Wall Street, American Heritage® Dictionary, and the Webster® Dictionary.

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