At the precise moment you finish typing a word – by pressing the spacebar, typing a period, or using some other punctuation – Word searches the list of typos and misspellings it knows about. If it thinks you’ve made a typo, it will correct it automatically for you. AutoCorrect is set up by default with a list of typical misspellings and symbols that uses commonly make, but you can modify the list that AutoCorrect uses.

Using Word’s AutoCorrect is also a great way to save time typing out long pieces of text, too. For example, you could set up the abbreviation cdc in the AutoCorrect list to be substituted by the phrase Centers for Disease Control. Once set up, each time you type “cdc” and press the spacebar, those letters will be replaced by “Centers for Disease Control”.

The AutoCorrect list is global across all the Microsoft Office 2010 programs that support this feature, which means that when you add or delete a word from the list in one Microsoft Office program, the other Office programs are also updated.

Word AutoCorrect Options

You can customize the way that Word AutoCorrect works: click the File tab > Options > Proofing, and then click the AutoCorrect Options button near the top of the window.

Click to enlarge

The AutoCorrect window has many tabs, but when it opens, it will display the AutoCorrect tab. The options at the top are basically a list of yes/no questions in the form of checkboxes, described as follows:

• Show AutoCorrect Options buttons – after an autocorrection has been applied, if you hover over the corrected word you’ll see the AutoCorrect Options button appear (see below). This checkbox turns it off.
• Correct TWo INitial CApitals – with this option checked, this sentence would become “Two Initial Capitals”
• Capitalize first letter of sentences – fairly self explanatory.
• Capitalize first letter of table cells – similar to the above option, except that table cell contents are treated in isolation. When you tab to the next cell, or press the spacebar, for example, the capital letter is applied to the first letter of the first word in the cell.
• Capitalize names of days – Word recognises the names of the days (there are only seven, after all) and when this option is checked, day names with lowercase initial letters are corrected.
• Correct accidental usage of cAPS LOCK key – Word can detect when you’ve accidentally left the Caps Lock button on and corrects the text you type.
• Replace text as you type – this section is geared towards setting up “shortcuts” for long pieces of text that would be tedious to type in. To set up “cdc” to be converted to “Centers for Disease Control”, see the image below.

Once you’ve made changes on the AutoCorrect window, click OK to save them. The changes you make take immediate effect.

AutoCorrect Options Buttons

Replace text as you type

It’s an easy job to remove table borders in your Word document.

First of all select your table: place the cursor in a table cell and then click the Layout tab (in the Table Tools contextual tab)> Next, click Select > Select Table.

Now that the entire table is selected, we can remove its boders. Click to the Design tab and click the down arrow to the right of the Borders button, in the Table Styles group. Make sure you click the down arrow and not the body of the button: clicking the main button area simply removes or adds the last border element used by this button. Word displays the last border element used on the button itself, so that’s helpful.

When you click the Borders down arrow, select the No Border option.

Voila – no borders. Don’t forget to select the table befor removing its borders. If you only put the cursor into a table cell and then remove borders, they are removed from that cell only. The rest of the table will keep its borders.

Imagine that we have a table full of text and that we want to keep the text but get rid of the table. We could just copy the text out of the table and paste it into a program like notepad, before copying it back to our document once the table has been deleted. The problem with doing this, however, is that we will lose any formatting that has been applied to the text. If the document was created by someone else, who knows what weird formatting they applied!

Fortunately for us, there happens to be a magic solution in Microsoft Word that we can use.

Select the table in your document and you should see the Table Tools contextual tab appear with the Design and Layout tabs within.

You can select the table simply by placing the cursor inside one of the cells.

Now click to the Layout tab within the Table Tools tab and then click on the Convert to Text button.

The Convert Table to Text window will display, giving us choices about how we want to separate the text in each cell. The best choice is often Paragraph marks, as shown in the image below, but you will have to decide what’s best for your unique situation.

Taking the Paragraph marks option will display each table cell’s text as a new paragraph.