Repurposing Microsoft Office’s autocorrect feature

Starting with Office ‘97 (I think), Microsoft introduced a feature called autocorrect — a realtime spellchecker that automatically corrects common misspellings and other typos that touch typists often make — like “teh” instead of “the” and things like that.

But, since it is so easy to add to the list, I have created whole list of abbreviations — a homegrown shorthand if you will — that are “corrected” transparently, with no special software. Some of them are:

  • t “corrected” to the
  • ot “corrected” to of the
  • fr “corrected” to from
  • bec “corrected” to because
  • …many more

3 Comments on “Repurposing Microsoft Office’s autocorrect feature”

  1. #1 Richard Wanderman
    on May 27th, 2004 at 10:20 pm

    So, show us the “many more” already!

  2. #2 William Coker, Jr.
    on Mar 2nd, 2005 at 4:00 pm

    David,
    I would like a copy of your entire list. I could see this also used with other systems that have abbreviation expansion as a primary encoding strategy, e.g. DynaWrite, EZ Keys, LightWriter.

  3. #3 Nikki
    on Mar 8th, 2005 at 2:41 pm

    I use AutoCorrect in the same way. I have hundreds of “quickwords” as we call them. I am a medical transcriptionist, and this saves hours of typing. I have some trouble, though. I’ve tried to copy my autocorrect file to my home computer but can’t get it to work. Any suggestions?

Leave a Comment