Using AutoCorrect to Type Faster

You see the result of AutoCorrect when you type a word such as teh and Word instantly transforms it into the. Don’t take AutoCorrect’s name too literally. Yes, it’s true that AutoCorrect watches over you, correcting typos in Word or Excel—for example, type isn;t and AutoCorrect converts it to isn’t. But it does much more:

• AutoCorrect works in all four programs in Office Home and Student 2007: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Customized AutoCorrect entries you create in one program work in all the others (with one exception discussed later in this section); if you tell Word to change mouses into mice, the correction applies in all other Office applications.

• You can create your own AutoCorrect entries to supercharge your typing—say, changing your shorthand tpfp into the Party of the First Part or otoh into on the other hand.

• If you commonly work with boilerplate text, AutoCorrect can handle it for you. Do you have a description of the history and goals of your local civic organization that you put at the end of letters and email messages to potential new members? Set up a code you can remember—such as history1—so it automatically expands on demand. An AutoCorrect entry can consist of paragraphs, even pages, of text, footnotes, and the like.

• In Word, AutoCorrect entries can include graphics. This is handy if you frequently reuse the same graphic image. For example, you might want to scan your signature and turn it into an AutoCorrect entry called mysig. Then, wherever you type mysig, your scanned signature appears.

• AutoCorrect can even help you with odd capitalization. For example, if you’re preparing a presentation about a company called ZapItInc, you might have trouble getting the caps right when you type the company name. Set up an AutoCorrect entry for zapitinc (all lowercase) and have it corrected to ZapItInc. Then every time you type zapitinc—or Zapitinc, ZapItinc, ZapitInc, or even zApitiNc—AutoCorrect automatically changes the word to ZapItInc.