>I'm looking for a way to spell check a text value and just return whether it exists in Word or Excel's dictionary. I don't want the spell checking dialog from word or excel to come up, I'd just like to have it return a value so that I know if it passed or failed the spell check. Anybody done this before? Thanks for any help.

oWord = CreateObject("Word.Application")
? oWord.CheckSpelling("the_word")

It returns true or false depending if the word was found on the dictionary.
HTH