Monday, January 2, 2012

Word autocorrect can be a lot like emacs abbrev-mode


Tired of typing the same stock phrases over and over again in Word? You can use a stand-in word and global search and replace when your document is finished but it's a lot more fun to watch Word automatically type for you.

For example, if you add an entry to your autocorrect dictionary as shown above, every time you type the key qnato, Word will instantly replace it with North American Treaty Organization just like emacs abbrev-mode.

If you have different groups of abbreviations for different kinds of writing you can prefix them all with the same letter or number and they will stay grouped and separate in the Word autocorrect dictionary.

Some general ideas for using this would be:

   @gg = @gmail.com
   @yy = @yahoo.com
   @me = your.name@bigcorp.com

You can also highlight an entire block of text and the entire block including all formatting can be assigned to an autocorrect  key. This would be useful for having various signature blocks, addresses and boilerplate sentences and paragraphs for business letters.

And the last thing you can do is select a photo or picture in a Word document and add an autocorrect key for it. For example if you paste a picture of The Dude into your document and add the key dude for it, every time you type dude, a picture of The Dude will be inserted.

Teachers can use this for easy clip art insertion. Any bit of art that is regularly being inserted into your documents can be assigned to a key.

You can build a dictionary with an image for every number and letter if you want for puzzle construction.

If it turns out that this a seldom used feature of autocorrect I would worry about normal.dot corruption if the images are large, especially since the art is probably stored in normal.dot.

2 comments:

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  2. Word autocorrect can be likened to a useful but occasionally erratic helper. It promises to help users by immediately correcting spelling mistakes and recommending alternate terms. few months ago i was write essay on this topic, you need anykind of help?about study related? visit Cheap Essay Writing service 24

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