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Article contributed by Suzanne S. Barnhill Updated for Word 2007
Many users think of Word’s
AutoCorrect feature as just a crutch for poor spellers and clumsy typists or the
source of maddening and unwanted changes in the text they enter. For some,
especially those who have enabled the option to
“Automatically
use suggestions from the spelling checker,” it is a source of either entertainment or embarrassment, depending
on whether or not they catch the
“corrections”
before the document is printed or distributed.
But AutoCorrect, used correctly, can fantastically increase your productivity.
Word has already given you a head start in this direction by including some
helpful built-in AutoCorrect features that you can use or not use at your
discretion. These include the ability to automatically capitalize the beginnings
of sentences (or what Word interprets as sentences) and correct other anomalies
in capitalization. Note that you can define exceptions to the capitalization
settings. And if you find that Word is not capitalizing words when you
expect it to, check to make sure that there is not an Exception causing this
(and be sure to clear the check box for
“Automatically
add words to list,”
since this is guaranteed to add a lot of unintended exceptions).
In Word 2000 and above, another common reason for failure to
correct capitalization errors is misspellings. Unfortunately, if you have
“Check
spelling as you type”
enabled and a word is marked as misspelled, Word will not correct capitalization
errors in it. The decision to make this change in behavior was no doubt based on
the not-unreasonable assumption that a
“misspelled”
word might be a brand name with anomalous capitalization, but it is nonetheless
very annoying.
AutoCorrect also includes a built-in list of frequently misspelled or mistyped
words. For example, if you often type
“teh”
for “the,”
you may not even notice that Word is silently correcting this for you, and you
almost certainly won’t
mind—except in the rare instances (as in this sentence) when you actually
want to type
“teh.”
Although the built-in AutoCorrect list is extensive, it is just the tip of the
iceberg. You can make AutoCorrect do so much more. To begin with, you can add
your own personal typing/spelling bugaboos. This is especially easy to do if you’re
using Word’s
“Check
spelling as you type”
option (enable this option in Word 2003 and earlier at
Tools | Options | Spelling & Grammar;
in Word 2007, it’s at Office Button |
Word Options | Proofing): When Word marks a word
as misspelled, right-click on it. Instead of choosing the correct spelling from
the list at the top of the shortcut menu, choose AutoCorrect instead, then
choose the word from the list in that submenu. The correction will be added to
the AutoCorrect list, and you’ll never have
to make the correction manually again.
But there’s
still more! AutoCorrect can do more than correct misspelling or mistyping. It
can also expand abbreviations. Suppose you are typing a long report in which the
company name “Consolidated
International Automated Widgets, Inc.” is repeated
very frequently. This gets old in a hurry, especially since any text that
involves a lot of capitals and punctuation tends to break your typing rhythm. So
select “Consolidated
International Automated Widgets, Inc.” and go to
Tools | AutoCorrect Options (Tools
| AutoCorrect in Word 2000; Office
Button | Word Options | Proofing | AutoCorrect Options in Word 2007). The
text will already be inserted in the
“With” box.
In the “Replace”
box, type the abbreviation you’d like to use for this entry—perhaps
“ciaw.”
Make sure your abbreviation is not an actual word or the beginning of a word and
that it does not duplicate any other AutoCorrect entry. Many users prefer to
begin AutoCorrect entries with a non-alphabetic character such as a slash or
semicolon. This allows them to use actual words, since it is very unlikely that,
say, “;word”
would appear in ordinary text. Another advantage is that entries beginning with
punctuation will be placed near the top of the AutoCorrect list, making it easy
to distinguish your entries from the built-in ones.
From now on, whenever you type
“ciaw,”
Word will insert
“Consolidated
International Automated Widgets, Inc.” The text will
be inserted with the formatting at the insertion point; for example, if you are
typing in a Heading 1 paragraph,
“Consolidated International Automated Widgets, Inc.”
will be inserted with Heading 1 font formatting.
If your replacement text contains characters that are not part of the basic
character set, you will need to designate your AutoCorrect entry as
“formatted
text.”
For example, if you select
“First‑Class Widget Sales” (using a
nonbreaking hyphen in
“First‑Class”),
you will see that the text appears in the
“With” box as
“First*Class
Widget Sales.”
Click the radio button for
“Formatted text,” and you’ll see the nonbreaking hyphen.
You can also use
“formatted
text”
for entries with direct font formatting. For example, I have an entry
“wsj”
that is expanded into The Wall Street Journal.
“Formatted
text”
entries will still adapt to their surroundings except for the specific font
formatting directly applied to the entry. So if you want to save an italic or
bold entry, make sure that the font of the selection is otherwise the Default
Paragraph Font (that is, you haven’t changed the font itself or the point size).
You can easily set up AutoCorrect entries for a specific document and then
remove them later. If you’re
careful to maintain the list in this way, you can get away with some
abbreviations that might not otherwise be suitable. For example, in one novel I
was typing, there were characters named John T. and C‑Boy (using a nonbreaking
space in one and a nonbreaking hyphen in the other); I entered these as
“jt”
and “cb.”
Long after I finished the book, my husband was using my computer and couldn’t
understand what was happening when he typed
“CB.”
I’d
neglected to delete those AutoCorrect entries!
Used correctly, AutoCorrect can make you more productive not only by keeping you
from having to correct your common typing errors but also by saving you from
repetitive typing of frequently used long words and phrases. AutoCorrect assumes new importance in Word 2007 because in that version AutoComplete is no longer available for AutoText entries. Although there is a limit of 255 characters for unformatted AutoCorrect entries, formatted ones can contain pretty much anything you can save as an AutoText entry, and insertion is triggered automatically by typing the prompt text so that you could, for example, insert an entire formatted table by typing “;table” or a picture just by typing a few letters. |
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