Grammarly For Microsoft Word Mac

Grammarly For Microsoft Word Mac Free
Grammarly For Microsoft Word Mac

For more than six years, we’ve supported Grammarly’s add-in for Word and Outlook on Windows. Mac users have been feeling left out: an add-in for Word on Mac has long been a top requested feature. There were many roadblocks to making this happen at the quality we expect for all of our offerings—but we were finally able to release Grammarly for Microsoft Word on Mac in beta at the end of 2019, followed by a full release in March 2020.

The path to get there was not always straightforward or direct. Here we’ll tell the story of the sometimes rocky road to our much-anticipated add-in for Word on Mac.

Grammarly for Microsoft Word and Outlook. Write better, clearer documents and emails.

Building a proof of concept

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Year after year, we’ve been evaluating this project. We didn’t want to start a new project on old tech, but for a while the only option was to build the add-in with Visual Basic Script. That changed when Microsoft introduced the Office add-in API, which is based on JavaScript and works across all devices as well as online in the browser. Last year, this new API looked stable and mature enough for us to set aside the necessary resources to tackle the project.

We needed a proof of concept to plan the UX, and we started by building out a few options. We had to choose between two different directions. The first was to build a pop-up editor, similar to what we have for the Grammarly browser extension. The pop-up editor works wonderfully in that circumstance. But when we tested the same UI in Word, we discovered that it didn’t serve the application as well. Using the pop-up editor means being taken momentarily away from the screen where you’re writing. People who write in Word are often doing so because they’re very familiar and comfortable with that writing tool, so taking them outside of the application to review writing suggestions led to a subpar user experience. We could do better.

The second option we considered was putting Grammarly’s suggestions directly in the Word sidebar while underlining the corresponding text in the document. This would essentially mimic the design of our add-in for Word for Windows:

When we started working with the JavaScript API, however, we quickly ran into restrictions that meant we wouldn’t be able to achieve the exact same functionality as our Word for Windows add-in, which is built on COM. Even so, putting the suggestions into the sidebar would make for the best option from a UX perspective—so this was the path we chose to follow.

Productionizing (and hitting snags)

Last year, we set to work productionizing the proof of concept while doing our best to get around the limitations of the Office add-in API. We wanted to achieve parity with our add-in for Word on Windows.

Unfortunately, we were often hampered by limited functionality. We’ll step through what we set out to achieve and give an indication of how well we fared in each case.

Render Grammarly suggestions in the sidebar 😌

This was possible to do using the Office add-in API, which gives applications full control to render content in the sidebar. We were able to make Grammarly’s writing suggestions appear in the sidebar cleanly and considered this a success.

Render Grammarly icon in the navigation bar 🙁

The top bar in Word is called a “ribbon” and is the standard element for navigation across Microsoft products. We wanted to be able to add badging to the Grammarly icon in the ribbon and update the user with the number of alerts in their document. Grammarly’s add-in for Word on Windows supports this with the COM API, but when using the new JavaScript API for Mac, we unfortunately could only render a static icon.

Here is the ribbon in Word on Windows, where the Grammarly icon is dynamic. While Grammarly is running, we can show badges in the navigation bar that update with real-time stats about the document:

Here is the ribbon in Word on Mac, where the Grammarly icon is static. Clicking on it lets the user open or close the application in the sidebar:

Access text and get `textChanged` events 😕

Grammarly’s writing assistant reviews text as it’s being written to offer suggestions in real-time. This means that our add-in for Word on Mac needed not only to be able to detect when the text was updated but also to get access to the text itself so that we could deliver our suggestions.

The first roadblock was the lack of a textChanged event in the JavaScript API. This doesn’t exist in the COM API on Windows, either, so it was a problem we already had some experience solving by polling the text.

The bigger issue we had to work around involved accessing ranges. A range is a section of text delineated by start and end points measured in characters. For example, in the text 'This is a test', delineating range(start: 5, end: 7) will give you the word 'is'.

Grammarly needs the range function to find the position in the text for a suggestion and to update the text when the user accepts the suggestion. While the JavaScript API provides some limited ways to access the text, it does not expose a way to get a range with specific start and end points. Our solution was to retrieve paragraphs from the document and then use the search API function with wildcards, a form of simplified regular expressions supported by Word. For example, search(`?{40}`)will return the first 40 characters in the text.

To better illustrate, below is some sample code for how we find ranges.

Here’s the helper function to find a range from the beginning of the text to a certain position:

Here’s the function to find the range given a starting and ending position:

Here’s an example of how to use the findRange function, which returns the text of the range:

This workaround gave us the results we needed, but the API design still led us to experience some performance issues (we will discuss these in more detail later on).

Move cursor to range 😌

When a user selects a Grammarly suggestion in the sidebar, they should be taken to the corresponding text. This means that we need to move the user’s cursor to that range of text when they click. Thankfully, the API supports a range.selectfunction and we were able to make this possible—another success.

Get range’s vertical coordinate 🙁

From a UX perspective, it would be nice to be able to align our suggestions with the corresponding piece of text in the document—that way a user would see them directly side by side. To do this, we’d need to have the vertical coordinate for a range of text. Unfortunately, while the COM API for Word on Windows supports this, the JavaScript add-in API for Mac does not—and there is no workaround.

Underline range 🙁

Probably the most disappointing limitation we encountered was regarding underlining text. We typically indicate where Grammarly’s suggestions are in the text by underlining the relevant parts of the text. On Windows, we are able to add custom underlines that are not applied to the actual document. However, with the JavaScript API, there is no way to achieve this in the way we need. We can change the formatting of a range of text, but that formatting change will be saved in the document itself, which is not what we want to do for our writing assistant.

For a brief moment, we considered adding a toggle in the sidebar for a user to click Remove Underlines or Add Underlines. But we quickly realized that this would be much too dangerous for users. Microsoft Word is evolving toward no longer relying on save functionality—instead the document is being constantly updated in the cloud. So the underlines we might apply to a text to alert users to Grammarly suggestions could inadvertently get saved with the document—and nobody wants to have a bunch of saved underlines in what they’re writing!

With no other option, we decided to avoid underlining and instead try highlighting the corresponding text when the user clicks on a Grammarly suggestion in the sidebar. This is done by just selecting the text (which the API enables), without making any underlying changes.

Change the text for a range 😐

Finally, for cases in which a suggestion is accepted, there needs to be a way for Grammarly to access the text and update it. Thankfully, the API does allow for this for Word using the range.insertText function.

Performance issues and other caveats

You may recall from our discussion of the textChangedissue that we are using search several times to retrieve a range of text. Each search is an API call, and each API call is a heavy operation. If we call search, Word doesn’t return the result immediately because it doesn’t want to lock the UI. It returns a Promise.

Accessing a range of text takes multiple API calls, and we are often retrieving the range multiple times to perform what the user would think of as a single operation. We’ve found that when we are hitting Word with multiple API calls at once, we run into lags of up to 500 milliseconds (and sometimes more). To handle this we have an internal queue so we can wait until our first call finishes before making another.

We have another workaround for performance issues encountered due to polling the text. As the API doesn’t expose a way to know when the document has changed, we need to continually poll the text and check for updates. But when we’re polling the text and making a call to the API at the same time, we end up with poor performance. To handle this, we have implemented cancellable text polling. Once a user clicks on a card or accepts a suggestion, we stop text polling (which may be in progress or might not have started yet), perform the necessary API calls to complete the user’s operation, and then resume text polling.

Since we’re using the search API so often, we found some nuanced issues. For example, we might receive an incorrect range if the paragraph we’re searching through contains hyperlinks or inline images. Thankfully, there is an API function to detect whether a paragraph contains hyperlinks or images. So we wrote some code to find these artifacts, remember whether they are, and split the paragraphs around them to avoid running into errors with our ranges.

Releasing our add-in for Word for Mac

The version of the add-in we released in March 2020 has a UI with slight changes from the beta. We did some more work to support Word Online, and in that application, the sidebar is a bit more narrow, about 200–300 pixels, so we updated our UI in the desktop version to match. Here’s a peek at the March release:

As we were building the add-in, we were able to take advantage of some work other teams at Grammarly were doing on the Grammarly Editor, our central web-based writing application. There’s an ongoing effort—which deserves its own blog post!—to split the editor into logical parts: the sidebar suggestions, the logic that handles the suggestions, libraries for handling user authorization and settings, libraries for real-time communication with back-end text-checking services, and so on. Based on work that had been done in this effort, we were able to reuse a lot of existing components and only had to adjust the Office add-in API to the required interface and implement the workarounds discussed. We’re pretty excited about how these new building blocks will help us rapidly prototype and launch new feature sets for Grammarly across applications and platforms.

If you’re interested in joining our team to build a product that helps more than 20 million people around the world write every day, check out our jobs page—Grammarly is hiring!

You can add Grammarly to Word by downloading the Microsoft Office plugin or through Microsoft AppSource.
You can also install the Grammarly desktop app on your Mac or PC and drag-and-drop your Word document into the app.
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Grammarly has become a popular digital writing tool for eliminating and protecting against everything from poor writing in rushed emails to bad structuring in your dissertation.

Launched in 2009, its dynamic algorithms cover a wide range of context-based text editing issues like basic spelling and grammar errors, but also word usage, sentence style, wordiness, and punctuation. Users can also upgrade to paid subscription tiers for individuals or businesses, and receive assistance with more complex issues like fluency, tone, clarity, plagiarism, and more.

If you're looking for something that goes deeper than Microsoft Word's spelling and grammar tool, this freemium subscription is the right for you.

How to use Grammarly with Microsoft Word

Grammarly offers several ways to use its services, from a browser-based website and extensions to desktop apps and a mobile keyboard.

You can edit your Word doc with Grammarly directly in the Microsoft program or drag and drop your Word doc into the Grammarly desktop app for quick assistance on edits.

The Grammarly desktop app for PC is compatible with Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10. For Mac, the device should be updated to macOS 10.9 or higher.

Since Microsoft Word is a separate system, you'll need to have a subscription to Microsoft Office in order to purchase or download extensions onto Word. For an 'Add-in' to be successfully added, you have to have Microsoft Office 2007, '10, '13, '16, or '19 for compatible operation on Windows. On Mac, it's strongly suggested to have Microsoft Office version 16 or higher.

Gallery: If You Have This Popular App On Your Phone, Delete It Now (Best Life)

If you want to use Grammarly alongside Word's spelling and grammar checker, here's how you can do it.

How to install the Grammarly plugin for Word

Go to the Grammarly website and click 'Get the add-in' to download the free MS Office Grammarly plugin.
After it finishes downloading, click the file in the bottom left of your browser window.
© Abbey White/Insider Click the Grammarly Add-in download link. Abbey White/Insider
Quick tip: The language may be slightly different on depending on whether you're using a Mac or PC, Chrome, Edge, or Firefox, but you will still need to open the downloaded file.
In the welcome window that appears, select 'Get Started.'
Click the box next to Grammarly for Word to ensure you download it.
Quick tip: You can also check the Grammarly for Outlook box if you want to add the extension to the Microsoft email client.
After it finishes installing, select 'Finish.'
© Abbey White/Insider Click 'Finish' to end the Grammarly plugin installation. Abbey White/Insider
Launch Word and open either a blank or existing document.
On the Home tab, click Open Grammarly.
© Abbey White/Insider Look for the Open Grammarly Icon in the Home Tab bar. Abbey White/Insider
Quick tip: The Home tab in Word is the default tab when you open a document.
The Grammarly window will appear on the right. Click 'Log in.'
© Abbey White/Insider The Grammarly window will appear on the right of your Word document. Abbey White/Insider
A new browser tab or window will appear with the Grammarly log in page loaded. Enter your username and password, then click 'Sign in.'
Quick tip: You can also log in to your Grammarly account using Facebook, Google, or App log ins.
Click the Word icon in the desktop taskbar. You should now see Grammarly working.

An alternative way to install Grammarly for Word

There are two ways you can add Grammarly to your Microsoft Office Word software. You can also visit Microsoft AppSource and search for Grammarly. Once the app appears in the search results, click 'Get It Now.'

When a pop-up window appears, click 'Continue' before hitting 'Open in Word' to launch the add-in. To confirm it's been added to Word, open a new Word document and look for the Open Grammarly option in the Home tab.

How to drag and drop Word docs into the Grammarly desktop app for Windows

Go to the Grammarly website and click 'Download Grammarly for Windows.'
© Abbey White/Insider The desktop app download page will only be available on Windows devices. Abbey White/Insider
After it's finished downloading, click the Grammarly download link at the bottom of your browser window.
Once it's loaded, the Grammarly app icon will flash in your taskbar. Click it to open the application.
Click 'Sign in.' © Abbey White/insider Click Sign in to begin logging into Grammarly on your Windows computer. Abbey White/insider
Enter your username and password.
You'll be redirected to a new page where you should click the 'Open Grammarly' button to be taken back to the Grammarly desktop app for Windows.
Either download or go to the file location of the Word document you want to edit in Grammarly. Drag the file from its folder location and hold it over the Grammarly icon.
© Abbey White/Insider Click and drag the Word file you want to edit in Grammarly and drop it over the Grammarly icon. Abbey White/Insider
You will see an import screen before the document appears in Grammarly.
© Abbey White/insider The import screen will appear while your Word doc us loading in Grammarly. Abbey White/insider
Quick tip: You can download the document from Grammarly after you're finished editing to preserve its format.