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Article contributed by Suzanne S. Barnhill and Dave Rado Many of Word’s unexpected changes result from the AutoFormat As You Type and AutoCorrect functions. AutoCorrect and AutoFormat can be tremendously helpful features, but when you don’t understand what they’re doing, they can cause many mysteries. The first thing to know is that whenever something happens in Word that you don’t understand, you can Undo it with the Undo button or by pressing Ctrl+Z. This is very useful for isolated instances where you don’t want Word to do something that ordinarily you’d be happy to have it do; for example, maybe you love “smart quotes” (the “curly” ones), but you want “straight quotes” when you’re writing about feet and inches: just use Ctrl+Z, which will reverse the AutoFormat but not the character insertion. The AutoFormat As You Type feature that seems to cause the most trouble is Borders (see “There is a line in my document that I can't delete because I can't select it. How did it get there, and what can I do about it?”), but “Automatic bulleted lists” and “Automatic numbered lists” are a close second, and users can also be annoyed by the AutoCorrect features dealing with capitalization. It's a good idea to look at all the tabs of the AutoCorrect Options dialog to familiarize yourself with what these options are and choose the ones you actually want. Access this dialog from the Tools menu in Word 2003 and earlier; in Word 2007, the path is Office Button | Word Options | Proofing | AutoCorrect Options. Perhaps the most insidious, and the most damaging in the long run, is “Define styles based on your formatting.” This was probably somebody's idea of a way to get more users to use styles other than Normal, and I have no quarrel with their motivation: styles are the single most powerful and useful feature in Word, and anything that encourages more users to discover them is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, far from encouraging users to use styles properly, it simply applies styles (almost always inappropriately) without most users' understanding what is going on—and as a result their documents rapidly begin to resemble a teenager's bedroom. What this option really means is “Apply styles that resemble your formatting.” So if you have a one-line paragraph which you have, for perfectly good reasons of your own, formatted as bold, perhaps in a larger point size than your text paragraphs, Word will decide that you mean to make it a heading and will apply one of its built-in heading styles (even though that style may not be what you intended at all). This is the most frequent single reason for people's tables of contents or Document Map not working properly. So this check box is a good one to clear! In fact, it is a good idea to turn off most of the options on the “AutoFormat” and “AutoFormat As You Type” tabs of AutoCorrect Options. In particular, it is best to turn off all the options under “Apply as you type” and “Automatically as you type”; the “Replace as you type” options are generally benign, but you will want to pick and choose these as well. In a business environment, it is a good idea to automate this centrally by running a macro such as the following whenever a user opens Word: Sub AutoExec() |
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