The following steps can be used to automatically change what you are typing into correct or expanded words or phrases. There are two things being achieved here:

a) You can customise auto correcting of misspelled words.

b) You can set up abbreviations you use in you typing, which Word will expand to the full phrase.

An example of how you can use this feature is your company name. E.g say you have a company called “Sam’s Second Hand Cars Limited”. Instead of typing this all of the time, you can do this shortcut, and so each time you type an abbreviation, say “ssh”, it can be turned into “Sam’s Second Hand Cars Limited”.

1.

From the Main Menu, choose Tools | AutoCorrect. This will present the following dialogue box.

The important part here is the “Replace” and “With” text areas. Also, the list of existing replacements are shown just below. This means that you can scroll through and adjust existing auto corrections as well.

2. Type the word, phrase or letters that you want to be identified and replaced, in the “Replace” area. Eg in our above example, you would type “ssh” (without the quotes).

3. Type in the word or phrase that you want to replace your text with in the “With” area. Eg in our above example, you would type “Sam’s Second Hand Cars Limited” (without the quotes).

4. Click “Add” to add this replacement into the list.

The dialogue box would then look like the following:

5. Click OK to save the change. This entry will be available now and whenever you run Word in the future.

6. Test by typing ssh in a document.

Note: The replacement system in Word always recognises words or phrases after the word or phrase has been typed and a space, comma, full stop or some other word delimiter is typed. This is to ensure that the specific word or phrase is being replaced.

Therefore, in your test you would type any of the following:

This is a test of ssh to see if it works

This is a test of ssh.

This is a test of ssh, to see if it works.

These will appear as the following:

This is a test of Sam’s Second Hand Cars Limited to see if it works

This is a test of Sam’s Second Hand Cars Limited.

This is a test of Sam’s Second Hand Cars Limited, to see if it works.