These should all be one feature because what they do overlap. I figure, being Microsoft, the terms all came from bickering sub-departments in the Word division. Either that or there really is a policy at Microsoft for giving things confusing and similar names<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here’s a rundown:<\/p>\n AutoCorrect<\/em> is the feature that fixes your typos as you type them. There are a slew of things that Word automatically auto-completes, such as (C) into ©. You can also add items as you spell-check your document, which is covered in my Word For Dummies<\/em> book.<\/p>\n AutoFormat<\/em> is the most annoying of the trio: It automatically reformats your text, adding automatic bullets, curly quotes, em dashes, bulleted lists, and other things people are surprised and offended by.<\/p>\n There is also a parallel feature to AutoFormat called AutoFormat As You Type<\/em>. Microsoft doesn’t really explain the difference between these features, which sport similar commands and options, and which induce similar feelings of despair and frustration.<\/p>\n Finally there’s AutoText<\/em>.<\/p>\n AutoText is a library of text, a gallery if you will. You can insert text from the gallery by typing in a fragment of that text. For example, you can type To Whom<\/strong> and Word instantly suggests To Whom It May Concern<\/em>.<\/p>\n Well, at least Word 2003 and earlier did that. Word 2007 does not, at least not with To Whom It May Concern<\/em>. That lack of automatic AutoText in Word 2007 is one of the reasons my reader asked me the question about where the heck is AutoText.<\/p>\n One AutoText thing that does survive in Word 2007 is the date. For example, if you’re typing in Word 2007 and you type the word May<\/strong> and a space, you’ll see today’s date displayed. That’s because it’s the month of May. Just press Enter to insert the date after typing May<\/em>, per the cartoon bubble suggestion:<\/p>\n The beauty of AutoText back in Word 2003 and earlier was that you could create your own AutoText entries and, obviously, save a lot of typing time.<\/p>\n For example, my company name back then was Not Another Writer. All I had to do was type Not<\/strong> and Word suggested Not Another Writer<\/em> to replace it. Pressing Enter swooped in the text for me.<\/p>\n You can still do that in Word, but you have to remember two things: How to use a new, confusingly-named feature called Quick Parts<\/em>, and you have to weld the notion that the F3 key really does mean something into your head. I’ll explain how they work in Friday’s blog post<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I received an email from a Word user who laments the loss of the AutoText feature in Word 2007. That got me thinking . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-1544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-word"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1544"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5748,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1544\/revisions\/5748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/may.png\" "\\"may\\"")
<\/p>\n