Using a spell checker with Notion – a few tips

1. A spell checker built into Notion app can’t be used in a browser.
2. You can disable it only after you make an error.

Here are a few things I have noticed when trying to find the most effective way to check the text in Notion.

How to disable or enable a built-in Notion spell checker

▸ You can only use the built-in Notion spell checker in native apps for Mac & Windows. Opposite to other spell checking options, it’s very basic.

▸ There is no general setting to disable or enable the spell checker in Notion. It can be only managed in single documents. So, if you want to disable the Notion spell checker once and for good, you won’t be able to do it.

▸ By default, the native spell checker is turned off. You will be able to access and disable it only after you have made a mistake and a row of red dots appears under the misspelled word.

▸ To disable the Notion native spell checker, select the word to correct and open a context menu (Mac: mouse click + Control; Windows: the secondary mouse button, Application key, or Shift+F10). From the menu, select “Disable spell check” option.

▸ To re-enable the Notion native spell checker, select any word in a document, open the context menu, and click on “Enable spell check” option at the bottom.

▸ If you use Notion in your web browser, the spell checker is overridden by the browser’s own spell checking tool (if it’s enabled) or a system spell checker. It’s because the context menu is already occupied by the browser or system.

How to use third-party spell checkers

▸ So far, Notion doesn’t go well with popular spell checking tools such as Grammarly or LanguageTool (the latter one is my favorite).

▸ The biggest problem is the block-based structure of Notion documents. Each block is being treated as a separate text area to check.

▸ As a result, you can’t use helpful features such as a word/character count or text score.

▸ What’s more, when using a third-party spell checker, the document suddenly becomes crowded with spell checker’s status buttons, which appear at the end of each text block.

▸ If you are irritated by how Notion handles third-party spell checkers, you can do two things:

– Write a document in a Notion app, and open it in a web browser to edit and correct spelling mistakes with the spell-checking browser extension.

– In your third-party spell checker extension, disable notion.so domain, and check the text by copying and pasting it to spell checker’s native edit tool. It’s the solution I use.

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Keep exploring. Here are other tips and how-to posts: