Using AutoCorrect

As you enter text into a document, various typing mistakes and misspellings are corrected
for you by a feature called AutoCorrect. If you’re familiar with using AutoCorrect on a smart-
phone, the feature in Word is similar, but it does more than correct commonly misspelled
words. Other corrections range from capitalizing the first letter of sentences and days of the
week to toggling the case of characters if you accidently enter them with Caps Lock on. For
example, if you enter the word “teh” as the first word of a sentence, AutoCorrect will both
capitalize the first letter and change the word to “the” after you press the Spacebar.

You also have the ability to reverse the action if it isn’t correct and remove words that you
don’t want corrected automatically. When a correction is made, point to the word to display
the AutoCorrect Options button, and then click the button to display a menu of choices.

To reverse the correction, click the first option, which will start with either Change back or
Undo. For the example previously provided, when the word “teh” as been entered at the
beginning of a sentence, the first option is Undo Automatic Corrections, because two cor-
rections were made. Clicking the option will reverse both the spelling of the word “the” and
the capitalization.

TIP You can also press Ctrl+Z to undo a correction immediately after it’s made.

If you never want the correction to be made again, click a Stop option, such as Stop Auto­
matically Correcting “teh”. Keep in mind that this will delete the entry and will take effect
for all documents. After an entry is deleted, you’ll need to manually add the entry in the
AutoCorrect dialog box in order for Word to start correcting it again.

174    Chapter 7 Editing and composing documents