Microsoft Word has some annoying features that, while intended to be helpful, simply get in the way instead. Don’t let your legal writing get blindsided by these features—turn them off. AutoFormat As You Type As you’re typing in Word, certain formatting decisions get made for you. For example, if you type “1st”, the “st” will get superscripted as soon as you hit the space bar. That’s Word’s option. In some instances (like the “1st” example), this can prove handy. In others, however, it’s just disastrous.
Type a series of dashes and hit the Enter key and you’ll see what I mean. You can set up AutoFormat As You Type to invoke less often. Go to the File tab, click Options, then in the Proofing section click AutoCorrect Options.
I am not sure if anyone has noticed or experienced but one of our users would like to add birthday event on his birthday calendar in outlook. We are using office 365. By default you can add birthday event on your birthday calendar via portal (web calendar) and you can see them on your calendar in outlook but you cannot add them. Dec 17, 2011 - I have so far disabled all auto-correct functions on Outlook's. I have to review every email to make sure it hasn't completely changed the intent of my words. Microsoft hates Apple and only grudgingly makes software for us. I just managed to turn it off by first going into system. July 23, 2016 at 7:07 pm.
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On the AutoFormat As You Type tab, you’ll see this: These are my recommended settings, but it’s ultimately about what works in your context. For example, if you copy text out of Word to paste into a timekeeping app, you’ll want to turn off the “smart quotes”, since those characters don’t always translate well to plain text. If that’s not an issue for you, and you like the formatted quotes, leave it checked. AutoCorrect AutoCorrect is the feature that automatically changes “teh” to “the”, and this is where it stores its dictionary of commonly misspelled words. Some entries, however, can cause problems.
For example, if your documents frequently use numbering schemes starting with “(a)”, you’ve probably noticed when you type “(c)” it turns into a copyright symbol. (If you get all the way down to “(r)” it will change it to the registered trademark symbol too.) You can edit or delete any entry in this dictionary. Just scroll down to find the offender, click on it, and either hit the Delete button or edit it in the Replace field. For example, you could edit the prompt for the copyright symbol to “((c))” to get it out of your way when typing “(c)”.
You’ll also want to take a look at the checkboxes above and turn selected ones off. Click OK to save your settings. Paste Options Box By default, anytime you paste text from one place to another in Word, a meant-to-be-helpful box appears just under the right corner of your pasted text: If you don’t like the way the text has pasted (wrong font, etc.), you can use this box to do a quick fix: If you find this annoying because you already know, you can turn this box off (again, this is within Options under the File tab): Automatic Grammar Check If you often find that marks sentences that aren’t actually grammatically wrong, you can disable it. Microsoft Word checks grammar at two points: (1) as you type (by placing a red wavy line under grammatically-suspect text) and (2) when you open the spell checker on the Review tab. You can turn either or both levels off (again, within Options under the File tab): Click OK at the bottom right to save your settings. What Microsoft Word behaviors would you like to turn off? Let us know in the comments below.
Unless otherwise noted, all instructions and screenshots are from Microsoft Word 2016 for Windows. @legalofficeguru: When I share a word document with an associate or client, I look just like that lady in the picture. My goal is to have a client comment on a draft document or an associate flesh out a settlement agreement. I give them a doc, they comment or add text. Simple, right? I started out giving them word docs, but inevitably they would screw up the lists, tables, fonts, formatting in all sorts of ways.
You’ve said that you can fix anything in word in 5 clicks. I have not found that to be the case. It would take me hours to correct the errors that creep into a lengthy contract. I switched to giving them PDFs to comment on, but no one knows how to use the comment function, so it’s useless for the client, and the associate can’t edit it. Is there a way to create a document with a “locked style” or something like that?
I either need to teach everyone I interact with to learn to use Word properly (fool’s errand), or switch to a different program, where they can’t screw up the formatting. I used this tip to turn off the automatic capitalization of a letter when i press enter and the cursor returns to the left hand side of the page. I have always been annoyed that a capital letter appears out of nowhere when I press Enter and I am not in mid sentence (and not needing a capital letter).
I’ve been wanting to know how to turn this off ever since I “upgraded” to MS Word 2010. For some unknown reason i always perform this capitalization my self when I NEED IT at the far left hand side.
Thanks Debra! All the features you have listed as “annoying” here are extremely helpful to 99% of Word users. Autocorrect, Autoformat, and Grammar Correction are all used by many professional writers. And what about the “Paste Options Box” is annoying??? It immediately goes away the second you start typing again and can be essentially helpful if you want to tell it to paste text only when it pasted the text and formatting as well. If a simple little popup for 2 seconds annoys you that much, how OCD are you?
What would have been helpful, would be instructions on how to disable the damn Researcher pane. It pops up for me whenever I paste from Wikipedia and it’s damn annoying. A couple of questions: (1) Click (left-click) or right-click? I turned on a bunch of spell check options in Word 2016 and left-clicked on a deliberately misspelled word, but wasn’t able to replicate what you described. (2) Do you have more than one language listed in File Options Language?
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I tried adding a language and still couldn’t replicate what you described. (3) Do you have custom dictionaries loaded? The biggest question is, what version of Word are you using? The spelling & grammar options, generally, are in File Options Proofing.
Was a long time coming, but it brings plenty of new features and better feature parity with the Windows version than ever. Microsoft has done a lot to streamline the experience, with a customizable, collapsible Ribbon as well as cross-platform keyboard shortcuts, but with any major Office update, there’s bound to be a learning curve. These tips for, Excel, Outlook, and should come in handy, and if you’re stumped about anything specific, let us know in the comments., with a wider release coming in September. If you need access to your files from anywhere, Office 2016’s built-in OneDrive & SharePoint integration makes cloud storage simple. To save to your OneDrive or SharePoint account, click the Online Locations button in the lower-left corner of a Save dialog box. Choose your existing account from the list, or click the Plus button to add another location.
What's the difference? Glad you asked. OneDrive is a consumer product for cloud storage, like iCloud Drive.
Aimed more at businesses, SharePoint acts like an intranet, letting teams share and collaborate on files. The redesigned Ribbon in Office 2016 unifies the look and functionality across all platforms.
It also takes up a lot of space, and can be pretty cluttered. If you need some extra screen real estate, hide the Ribbon by clicking on the small arrow on the far right side. Click the arrow to display the Ribbon again.
You can also show or hide the Ribbon by clicking on the currently active tab. Of course, you can put Office 2016 apps into full-screen mode by clicking the green full-screen button in the upper-left corner of any window. Outlook offers some excellent tools to quickly drill down to just the messages that matter right now. From Outlook’s Home tab, the Filter button quickly displays only certain messages, such as mail received today, this week, or this month. You can also filter for messages with attachments, unread emails, and several others. One of our favorite features is the ability to filter by category.
—you’ll need to split senders into relevant groups, but once you do, you can separate out messages from your boss, family, or whatever other group you need at the touch of a button.