Last month I mentioned Tools and Options for Excel — what's nice about Office products is that Tools and Options exists for every program, and it's a great place to customize your environment exactly the way you want it. So after the new install of Office, the first thing I do is go to Tools and Options, and in Word, I quickly proceed to the Spelling & Grammar tab. There are two options that I uncheck — “Check Spelling as you type”, and “Check Grammar as you type.” I can go into a whole soliloquy about the relative uselessness of the grammar checker, but frankly, it would anger a lot of you who actually use it, and it probably wouldn't be all that interesting to anyone who isn't an English major. Suffice it to say, I have had a few good laughs at some of the changes I've seen it make. 

One of the other things I setup in Word right away is a series of AutoCorrect entries. What is AutoCorrect? Well it's one of those handy features that you use all the time, whether or not you realize it. AutoCorrect solves a lot of your typing and spelling mishaps, from misspelling, to mistyping, to bad grammar. One of the most common misspellings is independent. If you incorrectly type it “independant,” AutoCorrect will automatically switch it to “independent.” Or if you type fast like I do, you may type 'tot he,' – which will switch to 'to the' or 'probelm,' which will switch to 'problem.' And for those of you who aren't quite sure about the differences between there, their, and they're – both 'their are' and 'they're are' will switch to 'there are.' mAYBE YOU'VE TYPED A SENTENCE LIKE THIS BEFORE. You had the caps lock key in without realizing it, but with AutoCorrect enabled, it will release the caps lock key and change the case of 'maybe' to be correct. You may have also noticed the copyright symbol © pops up when you type (c). 

As you can see, AutoCorrect is a handy feature in its own right; however, it becomes a serious timesaver when you program your own entries into it. I type the word 'fo' quite a bit. No, it's not that I don't enunciate 'for,' I really meant to type 'of.' This entry is not in the AutoCorrect list by default, so I have to add it. To add an entry, go to Tools on the menu bar, then AutoCorrect (or AutoCorrect Options in later Word versions). On the AutoCorrect tab, you will see the basic mistype and capitalization settings, and then a list of AutoCorrect entries. To add 'fo,' I simply type in 'fo' in the Replace window, tab to the With window, type 'of,'  and then click the Add button. I add all the words I commonly mistype — especially words that I mistype the first letter — those aren't usually in the list. 

Another time saving feature is to use AutoCorrect as a replacement tool. When I was writing those 10,000+ papers, I had to site the same author 2,000 times. Instead of typing '(Wojtkiewicz 2)' for each reference to the author, I made an AutoCorrect entry named 'woj' that when activated would automatically type '(Wojtkiewicz ' — then I would type the page number and end parenthesis for each individual entry. Very helpful too for important boss or client names that are hard to spell — if you have a correct AutoCorrect entry, you will never misspell it again!

Extra tip — To preserve text formatting or to add a picture as an AutoCorrect entry, select your text or picture first, then add your entry, and be sure to also  select the radio button labeled 'Formatted Text,' above the 'With' window in the AutoCorrect dialog box.

For inserting multiple lines, pages or pictures, you can use the main replacement tool in Word, AutoText. I've even used AutoText to insert complete block documents, like a standard letter. To use AutoText, select your text first, then go to Insert on the Menu bar, select AutoText, and then New. Then you simply name it, and the nice thing about AutoText is that you can name it a real word or even several words that are easily remembered. To see your AutoText entries, go to Insert, then AutoText, then AutoText again. 

You may notice that if you start to type a word that is the name of an AutoText entry, you will see a little yellow popup, which explains why you always see that guy whenever you type the word 'signature.' The major difference between AutoCorrect and AutoText is how the entry is activated and inserted into your document. With AutoCorrect, your entry is triggered by either the space bar or punctuation. With AutoText, you must either manually go through the Insert menu bar, then AutoText, then AutoText again to see the list of entries, or my personal favorite, type the entry name and hit the 'F3' button on your keyboard. With later versions of Word, you can also hit the 'Enter' key when you see the yellow popup with your entry as you are typing in your entry name. 

So that's AutoCorrect and AutoText in a nutshell. Use them to save time typing the same thing over and over again. The less typing time, the better...more time for editing! Woo-hoo!