Word: Avoid Typing Mistakes with AutoCorrect

Transcription

1 Word: Avoid Typing Mistakes with AutoCorrect W 483 / 1 How to Have Your Typing Errors Corrected Automatically by Microsoft Word We d all love to be perfect typists, never catching the wrong key by mistake or stumbling over oddlyspelt words. That may be a pipe dream, but Microsoft Word has a clever feature named AutoCorrect that saves you the annoyance of constantly backtracking to correct your mistakes. As soon as you type a word wrongly, AutoCorrect simply puts it right for you. To make the most of it, Word just needs a little teaching to recognise your most common mistakes. Read on to learn how to produce perfectly-typed documents every time with the help of AutoCorrect. By Sheila Reeves AutoCorrect: Let Word Do the Work for You!... How to Create Your Own AutoCorrect Entries... Quickly Add New Auto-corrections While You Work... This article shows you how to:... Set Word to correct your typing and spelling mistakes automatically... Type frequently-used words and phrases quickly Microsoft Word W 483 / 2 W 483 / 5 W 483 / 7 105

2 W 483 / 2 Word: Avoid Typing Mistakes with AutoCorrect Common typing mistakes fixed instantly A list of corrections AutoCorrect isn t limited to Microsoft Word AutoCorrect: Let Word Do the Work for You! What happens if you type the word teh into Microsoft Word and press the space bar? Straight away, Word spots the misspelling and replaces it automatically with the. Magic? Not at all this is the AutoCorrect feature at work. As soon as you type a space or a punctuation mark, this feature checks the word you just typed to see whether it appears as a wrong word in the AutoCorrect list. If it does, the word is instantly replaced with the corresponding right word. You can customise this AutoCorrect list to recognise and correct your own misspellings. For instance, you can set it to correct common mistakes such as wether instead of whether or seach in place of search. You can even make it replace quick abbreviations with long words that take time and care to type correctly, such as converting mnu to manufacturer. Or why not do the same for phrases you type regularly, such as replacing ys with Yours sincerely? Although this article is focused on Microsoft Word, the AutoCorrect feature is included in all Microsoft Office programs Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Outlook, and so on. Better still, the same list of auto-corrections is used in all these programs too.the result is that when you add a correction to the list using Word, AutoCorrect will automatically fix the same mistake if you make it while writing an message in Outlook or when adding text to a slide in PowerPoint. Even if you haven t added your own entries to the AutoCorrect list, you re already benefitting from this feature, as my teh/the example demonstrates. 106

3 Word: Avoid Typing Mistakes with AutoCorrect W 483 / 3 When Microsoft Office is installed, this list already contains several hundred common typing and spelling mistakes and their correct counterparts. The AutoCorrect list contains hundreds of useful corrections already Find Your Way to the AutoCorrect List To start adding your own AutoCorrect entries, you need to find your way to the AutoCorrect dialog. How you reach it depends on which version of Word you use: Different steps for different versions of Word Word 2010: click the blue File tab at the far left of the Ribbon. This opens Word 2010 s Backstage screen. At the left of this screen, click Options. In the Word Options window that appears, click Proofing in the left-hand panel, then click the Open the Options window 107

4 W 483 / 4 Word: Avoid Typing Mistakes with AutoCorrect AutoCorrect Options button on the right. In the dialog that appears, select the AutoCorrect tab. Click the Office button in Word 2007 Word 2007: click the circular Office button in the top-left corner of the window. Click the Word Options button at the bottom of the panel that appears. Open the Tools menu in earlier versions In the Options window that appears, click Proofing in the left-hand panel, then click the AutoCorrect Options button on the right. In the dialog that appears, select the AutoCorrect tab. Word 2003 and 2002/XP: open the Tools menu and click AutoCorrect Options. In the dialog that appears, make sure the AutoCorrect tab is selected. There may be occasions when you don t want AutoCorrect to fix your mistakes, because you re 108

5 Word: Avoid Typing Mistakes with AutoCorrect W 483 / 5 misspelling words on purpose. If you press Ctrl+Z as soon as AutoCorrect changes a word, it will revert to the spelling you used. However, if you need to do this a number of times when writing a children s spelling test, for example you can turn the feature off entirely: in this dialog, above the AutoCorrect list, just remove the tick beside Replace text as you type and then click OK.Now AutoCorrect will leave any typing mistakes unchanged until you return to this dialog and tick this option again to switch the feature back on. How to Create Your Own AutoCorrect Entries There are two ways to add your own entries to the AutoCorrect list. One way, which I ll explain later in this article, is in response to the red squiggly underlines that appear below words you mistype in a document. The other, more flexible way is to add your entries directly to the AutoCorrect list, and I ll start by explaining this method. As an example, let s assume that you often find yourself typing autoamtically instead of automatically, and you d like AutoCorrect to watch for this mistake and correct it for you: 1. Start by making your way to the AutoCorrect list as described in the previous section of this article. 2. In the box headed Replace, type the wronglyspelt word. 3. Click in the With box (or press the Tab key to jump to it) and type the word with its correct spelling. Make absolutely sure it is correct here, or AutoCorrect will just be replacing one misspelling with another! Add AutoCorrect entries yourself 109

6 W 483 / 6 Word: Avoid Typing Mistakes with AutoCorrect 4. Click the Add button to add this new pair of words to the list. Enter the wrong and right spelling Include formatting with a word or phrase 5. If there are other pairs of words you d like to add, go back to step 2. When you ve finished adding entries, click OK. As well as its obvious use for correcting misspellings, AutoCorrect can be used just to save time and typing with long words and phrases you use regularly. For instance, you could enter ys in the Replace box and Yours sincerely in the With box. In future, just type ys on a new line at the end of a letter you re writing, add the comma, and Word will instantly replace this with Yours sincerely. Just one word of caution if you use this tip: be sure to choose an abbreviation that isn t a real word! As an obvious example, if you were to enter yours in the Replace box, you d never be able to use that word in a document by itself it would always be changed to Yours sincerely! AutoCorrect has one other clever trick up its sleeve. Not only can you use whole phrases in the With box, but you can also store their formatting with them. If there s a phrase you use that should always be in blue, italic text, for example, you can ensure that it s stored that way in the AutoCorrect list (and therefore always appears that way in your documents). 110

7 Word: Avoid Typing Mistakes with AutoCorrect W 483 / 7 To use this feature, type the phrase into your Word document, format it the way you want it, and then highlight the whole phrase. Follow the earlier steps to make your way to the AutoCorrect list and, when you arrive, you ll see that this phrase has been inserted into the With box for you automatically. Just above the phrase, select the Formatted text option, then type the abbreviation you want to use in the Replace box and click the Add button. From now on, whenever you type the abbreviation into a document, AutoCorrect will replace it with this ready-formatted phrase. Type it into a document, format it, then highlight it Quickly Add New Auto-corrections While You Work I mentioned earlier that there are two ways to add AutoCorrect entries to the list, and this is the second method. When you mistype a word in a document, and you see a red underline beneath it, you can quickly add this misspelling to the AutoCorrect list along with the correct spelling suggested by Microsoft Word: 1. Right-click the mistyped word that s been given a red underline. 111

8 W 483 / 8 Word: Avoid Typing Mistakes with AutoCorrect Choose the word you meant to type 2. On the menu that appears, move the mouse down to AutoCorrect. 3. In the short list of suggested words that appears, click the word you meant to type. As well as correcting the word you ve mistyped in this document, AutoCorrect will add this pair to its list and correct the same mistake automatically whenever it occurs in future. (Bear in mind, though, that you ll only see the correctly-spelt word on this menu if Word can make some sense of what you typed! If it can t, the menu may be empty, or it may offer words that are similar to what you typed while not being close to what you actually wanted.) 112