When Helping Hurts - telling Word you really know what you mean (AutoCorrect revisited)

I recently received email from a customer who works for the National Institutes of Health, and she was getting ready to throw her machine, her desk, her monitor, and possibly even an unwitting co-worker or two out of the nearest window because of Word's insistance that she couldn't possibly mean to type "EHR" in a document. Clearly what she meant to type was "HER" and Word's AutoCorrect function has plenty of patience for left-hand-faster-than-right-hand letter juxtaposition. It will happily fix "ehr" to "her" all day long with nary a complaint.

Except she knew exactly what she was doing. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act created an new acronym now in use by every healthcare administrator who documents ARRA/HITECH policy as they prepare for Meaningful Use. That acronym is EHR, which stands for Electronic Health Record and is not "her" misspelled as Word would like to think.

Crabby provides great tips in her recent blog post about AutoCorrect. You really can save yourself trouble when you frequently mistype a word the same way. (Personally, I can't seem to get my name right half of the time. I type "Crhis" instead of "Chris" and I've thankfully programmed AutoCorrect to come to the rescue.) But what do you do when you know you are right and Word is wrong?

There are two ways to fix this and show Word you really are the brains in the relationship.

Option 1 - use what we call the "on object UI" to stop the auto-correction as it happens. Do this one time, and it should keep the setting from then on.

1. Go into Word or Outlook and type "EHR" you should see it auto-correct to "HER" but before you continue typing move the mouse over the auto-corrected word

2. You should notice a small box graphic near the word, it would look something like this:

3. Hover on it then click the lightning bolt to get a menu and you should notice a set of options

4. After you choose the one to stop automatically correcting "ehr", you should be good to go from then on

Option 2 - go into the AutoCorrect dialog and customize to your heart's content. AutoCorrect is actually a separate list from the spelling dictionary, so you can customize them separately.

1. You will need to find where to launch the Word or Outlook options dialog - in Office 2007 it is off of the Application menu (behind the round Office button) at the bottom of that menu - in Office 2010 it is in the Backstage view (click 'File') just below Help on the right hand side

2. Inside the options dialog, you are looking for the AutoCorrect Options - in Word this is on the Proofing tab, in Outlook it's on the Mail tab - it should be a button that looks like one of these:

Outlook:

Word:

3. If you scroll the list down, you will notice the offending correction entry:

4. You can hit Delete to remove that option from the list

5. Notice you can also add more auto-corrections to this list, so you can have Word and Outlook correct your own common errors as you make them (more on this in a later post)

Hope that is clear and helpful. May you use AutoCorrect to its full capacity, but not one iota more than you want to.

Oh, and in case you are wondering where the pithy supermarket analogy is today, I was going to make some reference to new PLUs for avocados but I made them into guacamole before I could sort it out. So this is what it is.

Chris Bryant
More free help than you can handle, at Office.com - sorry we are all out of avocados