One of Word’s most useful tools is AutoCorrect. AutoCorrect is like AutoFormat; it corrects words as you type based on your settings. Everyone will always type or spell words incorrectly; AutoCorrect can fix those mistakes instantly. Be careful, though, because Word isn’t human. If you always mistype the word “there” as “three,” and then set AutoCorrect to correct that, every time you type “three” it will be changed to there.

 

If Word has corrected a word, you’ll see a lightning bolt () appear by the word. You can then click the lightning bolt to see more options. Here’s an example:

 

 

 

You can choose to Change the text Back to what it was, to Stop Automatically Correcting this error, or to Control AutoCorrect Options.

 

You can also set options from within the text. Just right-click on a misspelled word, click AutoCorrect, and choose what you want to AutoCorrect to:

 

 

In the future, when you misspell this word in this way (in the example above, type yuors instead of yours) it will be automatically corrected after you press the spacebar.

 

To see what AutoCorrect is correcting, click the Tools menu and click AutoCorrect Options. (You can also access these options from either of the context menus we just looked at.) You’ll see this dialog appear:

 

 

The first check box (Show AutoCorrect Options buttons) enables or disables the lightning-bolt icon that appears when Word AutoCorrects an item.

 

The next five options control capitalizations. (You can also click the Exceptions button to set exceptions for these rules.)

 

You can turn AutoCorrect off by unchecking the sixth button, Replace text as you type.

 

You can also enter AutoCorrect options manually using the Replace and With text boxes. Enter your misspelled word in the Replace box and enter its replacement in the With box. (The Plain Text and Formatted Text options are only available if you have text selected in your document. If this is the case, the selected text will appear formatted in the With text box. You can delete it to place your own entry there.) Once you have entered your text, press the Add button to add it to the list.

 

Conveniently, the list of AutoCorrect entries is right below the Replace and With boxes. You can scroll through this list and delete entries that you don’t want by selecting them and clicking the delete button.

 

The last checkbox allows you to use (or choose not to use) suggestions from the spell checker. Once you’re done configuring these options, click OK to save your changes or Cancel to discard them.

 

Note that all AutoCorrect changes are immediately applied to all documents, and are saved in normal.dot (the global template) for future documents.