Save time with AutoCorrect!

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OFFICE By Mary Branscombe You can make AutoCorrect more useful by adding your own corrections and copying those to wherever you need them. Whenever yo
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CraigS26, mvpjjf, lmacri, glnz, fisher75

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Thanks for the update on Autocorrect.

One useful thing you can do is use Autocorrect to type those things you type repeatedly day after day. I have a three letter abbreviation for my email, cell phone #, address, company name, etc. One thing I have always been curious about is the length of the replaced text. Do you know how may characters you can replace with Autocorrect?

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BillB wrote:

Do you know how may characters you can replace with Autocorrect?

AutoCorrect lets you insert up to 255 characters; if you want to have something longer use AutoText. Press Alt-F3 to get the Create New Building Block dialog then Insert | Text | Quick Parts to pick it (or just start typing what you want replaced and you should see a little popup with what you’ll get if you hit Enter, same as when you start typing your name and Word offers to fill it in for you, which is also done by AutoText).

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Thank you for the article.
I have always had reservations about the ribbon, having become very familiar with the earlier Word menus (which allowed me to colour the icons). Now with Word 13 on my PC, I have installed Ubitmenu, a small, free, seemingly virus-free add-in (Just Google the name or go to https://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/). This inserts ‘Menu’ between ‘HOME’ and ‘INSERT’ on the top line. When ‘Menu’ is clicked, the ribbon disappears and a line of the original tabs appears underneath. When these are clicked, they open with the original drop-down menus of older Word versions, including Autoformat and Autocorrect. There are also shortcut icons for the most useful functions as well as the shortcuts from any ribbon customisations you may have chosen to make. I use this all the time. The whole thing occupies no more space than the ribbon itself.

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I avoid the problem of “clashing corrections” by adding x at the end of most of my abbreviations.

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I just noticed the “Math AutoCorrect” tab in the AutoCorrect Manager, but those abbreviations (starting with \ ) seem not to work on my Word.  Nothing happens.

What am I doing wrong?

UPDATE – I FOUND ANSWER:

• Check the ‘Use Math AutoCorrect rules outside of math regions’ checkbox.
• Then click OK

Thanks.

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In very old Word, there used to be an easy function to permanently store a correction in your AutoCorrect, just a single right-click option away.

So, if I right-clicked foreclsoure to correct it to foreclosure, I would have the immediate single-right-click-step ability to add that correction as a permanent AutoCorrect.

But MS removed that option a long time ago.

Is there any way to get it back?

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@glnz: Mary mentioned that in the article: “the free DocTools AddAutoCorrect add-in from Lene Fredborg will put it on the menu for you”.

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Mary Branscombe

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glnz wrote:

Is there any way to get it back?

if you have a newer version of Word, adding the correction to AutoCorrect is back on the context menu at the third level so it’s worth expanding those to check; if not, as @mvpjf says, you can install the free add-in.

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Mary and mvpjjf – thanks for your suggestion.  Unfortunately, in Word, the add-on doesn’t quite do what Word did many years ago.  It does NOT automatically add my manual correction to AutoCorrect but instead just opens AutoCorrect faster but I must still manually type the wrong spelling and the right spelling.  (See screenshot below.  I had deliberately typed Mitser with the hope of very quickly correcting it to Mister automatically forever.)  By the way, I am doing this at work on MS Professional Plus 2016 on Win 10 Pro.

I recall that Word used to have a very fast right-click option to put the initial correction straight into AutoCorrect, and I used it a lot.  Is there anything similar?

By the way, in Outlook, when I make a new email and hit F7 over a red squiggly line misspelled word, it DOES give me the option of adding the correction to AutoCorrect immediately, although that comes only from hitting F7, not right-clicking.  See second screenshot below.

Now from Outlook:

So, is there any way to get back to what Word had maybe 20 years ago?

Thanks.

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I’m not sure which version of Office you have, but the Outlook dialog suggests it’s not a recent version because it would be a task pane at the right: the current subscription version of Word does have a right-click option to immediately add a spelling correction to AutoCorrect, just buried three levels deep on the context menu as long as Word suggests a correct spelling – so here, I right-clicked on cpy and kept expanding the context menu. If that’s what you’re looking for, upgrading to Word 2019 or later will get it for you.

otherwise, you can save a bit of time by selecting and copying the incorrect spelling then using  File | Options | Proofing | AutoCorrect Options or Alt+T | A rather than the context menu or add-in to open AutoCorrect options and at least not have to type the mistake again.

And if you don’t want to upgrade, it’s slow but you can just paste all your errors into an Outlook email and add them to AutoCorrect there!

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