Using Word’s Auto correct feature for creating your shortcuts

I’m sure you all must have noticed word automatically correct most of your typos.. and the moment you see ‘ teh’  getting corrected into ‘the’  or when you see that smiley when you put in :-)you’d be like wow now thats an intelligent software….. Well the truth is this is not really the work of intelligence but more of an efficient work of a find and replace kind of thing.

If you open up Word’s Auto Correct list. You can do that by going into Word Options > Proofing> Auto Correct in Word 2007 or for Word 2003 its Tools>AutoCorrect Options.
and there you’ll see a huge list of the most commonly misspelt words and their correct options. The way it works is everytime you type a word, MS Word would come in here check to see if the word that you typed is present, and if yes then replace it with the correct option thats set. So rather than praising the intelligence of MS Word we should appreciate the people who sat down and built up this whole database of the most commonly misspelt words.

The good thing about the AutoCorrect Options is that you can add your own common words and what it should replace it with… and this is what I really liked about it because I could customize it as per my typos, but not only that I could also use to the expand abbreviations or I can create my own little shortcuts, which could be replaced by a complete set of texts.

So I could set common abbreviations like HTH to be replaced by ‘ Hope that Helps’ or a KIT to be replaced by ‘Keep in touch’ and so on.. I particularly remember this one time, when we had to put together a 100+ page document for the Live Communication Server (LCS), and as per MSFT’s instructions, LCS should always be referred to as ‘ Microsoft Office Live Communication Server Enterprise Edition’ or ‘Microsoft Office Live Communication Server Standard Edition’, Imagine me trying to type this out over and over again, through 100 pages.. no way sir..  all I had to do was open up AutoCorrect  and set
LCSEE => Microsoft Office Live Communication Server Enterprise Edition and
LCSSE => Microsoft Office Live Communication Server Standard Edition
After that life wasn’t that difficult anymore…