AutoCorrecting in Word

I am a TERRIBLE keyboarder. I hit two keys together, my left hand is faster than my right, I glance past other keys on the way to the one I want: I constantly type 'inforamtion' and 'teh'. I use AutoCorrect minute by minute to unscramble my terrible typing. To complicate matters further, I also use Dragon Naturally Speaking. Despite years of training, the software simply cannot hear some elements of the Kiwi accent, so I use AutoCorrect to turn things that Dragon 'hears' as 'am Berala' into what I actually said: 'umbrella'.

An incredibly useful little piece of kit, AutoCorrect. My AutoCorrect list has thousands of entries. All I needed to do was to highlight the offending word, right click for the pop-up menu, then select AutoCorrect | AutoCorrect Options to find that my piece of garble was already in the left-hand field, so I could then add how it should be written in the right-hand field. So convenient.

However, having been forced to finally move to Office 365, I was couldn't find the right-click pop-up menu item, AutoCorrect. I assumed - how foolish and naive was I?! - that Word was automatically adding any selected suggested right-click menu corrections to the AutoCorrect list. Then I started to notice that the same mistakes were appearing. Dammit! AutoCorrect was missing: and worse, it didn't appear anywhere on a ribbon!

Apparently lots of people have complained that - as usual - Microsoft has taken away a key piece of kit without checking with users first. Why don't they ASK us?! Why don't they come and see how users actually work before taking away these tools? Grr! Anyway, at some point in the future Microsoft is going to do something about this. Possibly. For the meantime though, you can do something about this actually, if you are an AutoCorrect user.

Simply go to your Customise Quick Access Toolbar dropdown, and select More Commands. From the "Choose commands from:" dropdown, select All Commands. Scroll down through the As until you find AutoCorrect Options. Add it to your Customise Quick Access Toolbar. Once done, you can highlight the word you want to change, and simply click that link, which is visible regardless which ribbon you are on.

There is another step you can take if you would like to. You could go to Greg Maxey's site (here) and download a Word template, which you can install in your Word's template folder. This will restore your right click menu AutoCorrect item in Word.

I have decided to stay with the option on my universal toolbar for now.


Sam

References:

• Bosworth, L. (5 May 2016). Why is the right click > AutoCorrect menu missing from Word 2016? Retrieved from http://blog.l3db6h.uk/2016/05/enable-right-click-autocorrect-options-word-2016/
• Maxey, G. (n.d.). Word 2013\2016 AutoCorrect Restored. Retrieved from https://gregmaxey.com/word_tip_pages/customize_shortcut_menu.html#WACR