By default, Word 98 automatically checks your spelling and underlines in red any words it thinks are misspelled. You can either ignore Word and do the traditional spell check later, or use Word's contextual menus to select alternative spellings. To do this, you click on the offending word while holding the control key. A contextual menu of alternatives pops up, from which you can select the correctly spelled word. Word also offers a grammar checker and a built-in thesaurus.
Word tries to automate typing in small ways.
For example, when you start to type the name of a day of the week or a month of the year, Word recognizes this and prompts you to let it complete the word automatically. Support for versioning lets you keep multiple versions of the same document in one file. In a slightly different twist on versions, you can set a preference to automatically save files in a previous version of Word. This is handy when you are working with colleagues who have an older version. Microsoft is aware that many of its Macintosh customers are still using Word 5.1 for a variety of reasons.