Removing Confusion When Using AutoCorrect

I find the ability to create AutoCorrect entries to be very useful and have added extensive words and phrases to make it easier for me to type my business letters. It is great because I can create short mnemonics that are automatically expanded to something longer.

I'm not alone in this approach to using AutoCorrect, either. This has led to some amusing situations. I have a friend whose employee was typing a newsletter for his baseball team. He used the word "bat" and "bats" multiple times. My friend's business is batteries, and he uses "bat" and "bats" as abbreviations that he set up to AutoCorrect to "battery" and "batteries." When the employee typed out the newsletter, he had no idea where all the words had come from.

In my usage of AutoCorrect, I have some other words such as "fullopt" that insert about half a page of text describing various options. Typing my initials inserts "Yours truly," three blank lines, and then my full name and title.

To avoid confusion when using AutoCorrect like my friend's employee experienced, my friend settled on a convention that uses an asterisk to the end of the AutoCorrect keyword. Thus, he uses "bat*" and "bats*" instead of "bat" and "bats." With no asterisk, no automatic correction is made. The asterisk triggers the use of the AutoCorrect feature and inserts the full text.

Obviously, this approach works for my friend, but a different approach may work for you. Another friend reports that he often uses acronyms common to electrical design, and in first usage of the acronym he has to spell out its meaning fully. This means setting up two AutoCorrect entries. For one he uses the acronym in lowercase (such as "ocpd") which automatically corrects to uppercase ("OCPD") and for the other he uses the lowercase acronym with an "x" at the beginning, as in "xocpd." This automatically corrects to "overcurrent protective device (OCPD)." The "x" as a prefix makes sense to my friend because it provides the "eXpanded" version of the acronym.

The bottom line is that you can get very creative with AutoCorrect, but you need to think through what "naming convention" you want to use for your AutoCorrect entries in order to avoid confusion.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (12547) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Removing Confusion When Using AutoCorrect.