Make sure that each station in your workgroup has the same customized user dictionaries installed and added, so that a document uses the same spelling and hyphenation rules regardless of who is working on it. You can either make sure that everyone adds the same dictionaries to their computer, or you can share a user dictionary over the network server.

A lock icon  indicates that a dictionary is locked and can be used, but not edited. When a user dictionary is stored on a server, the first user to load the dictionary locks the file; all subsequent users see that the dictionary is locked. Files can also be locked through the operating system, when the file is made read-only. If you share a user dictionary over the network server, you may want to lock the file so that it’s read-only for all users, allowing only the administrator to add words.

Make sure that everyone in the workgroup uses the customized user dictionary installed on the common network workstation, and not the dictionary stored with a document. However, before you take a document to a service provider, you might want to merge the user dictionary into the document. (See Change dictionary preferences.)

If you don’t share a customized user dictionary on a common network workstation, use your system Find command to locate user dictionary files and copy them from one workstation to another. (You might need to search for system folders.) If you use the Proximity dictionaries installed by InDesign, you can recognize the user dictionary file for each language by its .udc file name extension (such as eng.udc).

After you update a shared workstation’s user dictionary, the changes don’t appear in individual workstations until a user restarts InDesign or presses Ctrl+Alt+/ (Windows) or Command+ Option+/ (Mac OS) to recompose all text.