it also wouldn't make sense for Office to have different dictionaries between its Mac and PC (and web) versions.
Why?
99.9% of people using Microsoft Office are using it on one computer. I'd wager the majority of those people aren't using only Microsoft Office and nothing else.
If Office used the system dictionary, then people's added words would exist in every application they use, and not just every application except Office.
> 99.9% of people using Microsoft Office are using it on one computer. I'd wager the majority of those people aren't using only Microsoft Office and nothing else.
If you step outside the tech bubble, yoı'll see Microsoft Office is actually used to do, you know, office work quite extensively. If you work in a big enough company, it is probably an Excel file transferred from your company to the bank that paid your salary. This is its major purpose and where it is being used predominantly. As you can guess, those files are being shared accross computers that run completely different OSes.
Word is a word processing program. Its job is provide a consistent experience in paper-form document generation. Its job is to be useful and consistent regardless of the underlying system. It gives you suggestions based on its own dictionary that has extra metadata. I doubt that your system has the exact metadata it has.
It could be a reasonable ask to support injecting words from the system user dictionary but those are rarely the formal words one would use regularly in Word.
> 99.9% of people using Microsoft Office are using it on one computer.
That's not even close to true.
A lot of people use a company PC to work at the office, and a Mac laptop at home. Or vice-versa. And they make edits on their iPhone. Or Android. Or iPad. Or Surface. Some of these use an installed version, and some of them use a web version.
People today absolutely do not stick to one device, or even one operating system.
To be honest, the idea of a system dictionary that is tied to a single device doesn't make much sense in today's world. The Mac dictionary doesn't even get synced to other devices logged in with the same Apple ID!
And the Microsoft Word spellcheck feature predates the macOS one by many years.
If the custom words in your spell checker are so essential OS level is still preferable than app level because you only need to add the words to the operating systems you use not every single app you use ever.
These justifications just don't hold up to me and feels like we're starting to make excuses for why electron devs feel the need to waste time and money writing customer spell checking solutions.
Why?
99.9% of people using Microsoft Office are using it on one computer. I'd wager the majority of those people aren't using only Microsoft Office and nothing else.
If Office used the system dictionary, then people's added words would exist in every application they use, and not just every application except Office.