TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:Word smileys and other useful writing tips From:"Geoff Hart (by way of \"Eric J. Ray\" <ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com>)" <ght -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> Date:Thu, 29 Oct 1998 05:46:42 -0700
John Nesbit <<...accidently created a smiley face character on my
Word document when attempting to write an end parentheses ) I tried
to duplucate the feat and checked a few Word resources to no avail.
Does anyone out there know about this feature??>>
Yup. You've discovered Word's autocorrect feature, which uses a list
of letter combinations to replace certain character combinations with
a single character. I believe you can get the smiley by typing :-) or
:) and various other similar keystrokes. To see what things Word will
automatically try to fix, go to the Tools menu and select
Autocorrect... to display the list of predefined characters.
Techwhirler tie-in: This can be incredibly annoying if Word keeps
correcting a set of characters that you like just fine the way they
are, so it's worth looking through the autocorrect list and deleting
any combos you'd like to use unmodified. Conversely, this is a great
productivity tool if you use it judiciously. For example, you could
teach Word to autocorrect "STC" to "Society for Technical
Communication" and save an awful lot of typing if you write a lot
about STC and hate the acronym. Similarly, if you're documenting one
of those awful products with a long, ghastly name and weird internal
capitalization (OddCaptlzationMker), you could use Autocorrect to
create a two- or three-letter shortcut (OCM). One neat thing about
Autocorrect is that you don't have to accept it's behaviour: you can
turn it off for any words you like to leave as is. Moreover, Word
only makes the autocorrection when you enter a space to create a new
word or punctuation (including parentheses) to indicate the end of a
sentence or sentence component. If Word makes an autocorrection that
you don't like, simply hit the backspace key before proceeding with
the next letter; Word restores what you typed.
--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"By God, for a moment there it all made sense!"--Gahan Wilson
