AutoCorrecting from the Context Menu

Jennifer's company just recently upgraded to the latest version of Microsoft Office. One of the Word features she used to rely on all the time was the ability to right-click on a misspelled word and add it to AutoCorrect right from the Context menu. She noted that it seems to be gone in the new version of Word and wonders if there is a way to restore the capability.

This change—removing the AutoCorrect options from the Context menu in Word 2013—is one that was met with overwhelming disapproval by the community of Word users. In fact, many people decided not to upgrade to 2013 at all because of this one change in the interface.

What was Microsoft's reasoning for the change? They officially said "To make Word 2013 cleaner and less cluttered, we removed AutoCorrect and certain formatting tools from the spelling error context menu. The features are still available in Word 2013 through other entry points within the Word user interface." You can find this reasoning here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc178954%28en-us%29.aspx

Still, there were howls from users, but Microsoft did not budge—the options were no longer in the Context menus.

There are a couple of ways around this change, however. You could, if you desire, add AutoCorrect to the Quick Access Toolbar. Follow these steps:

1. Display the Word Options dialog box. (In Word 2007 click the Office button and then click Word Options. In Word 2010 or a later version, display the File tab of the ribbon and then click Options.)
2. At the left side of the dialog box click Customize (Word 2007) or Quick Access Toolbar (later versions of Word). (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Quick Access Toolbar area of the Word Options dialog box.

3. Using the Choose Commands From drop-down list, choose All Commands.
4. In the list of commands, locate and select the AutoCorrect Options command. (There are two such commands in the list. Make sure you pick the one that has the lightning bolt as an icon.)
5. Click the Add button. The AutoCorrect Options command now appears at the right side of the dialog box, in the list of Quick Access Toolbar commands.
6. Use the Up and Down arrow buttons, as desired, to situate the command within the Quick Access Toolbar commands.
7. Click OK.

To use the tool, select any word you want added to AutoCorrect, click the tool, and then type what you want it replaced with. This isn't quite as fast as the old Context-menu technique, but it is close.

If you absolutely want the AutoText capability added back to the Context menu, then you may be interested in a free template created by Greg Maxey. You can find information about it at his website:

http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/word_tip_pages/customize_shortcut_menu.html#WACR

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13131) applies to Microsoft Word 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365.