Word 2007: Click the large Microsoft button in the top left, click Word Options, click Proofing, then click the AutoCorrect Options button in the AutoCorrect options section.Word 2003: From the menu, select Tools > AutoCorrect Options.Select and copy CO 2 and its following space.In your document, type CO2 and a space, then format it correctly (capital letters, then subscript the 2 but not the space you should have CO 2 ).
#SAVE TEXT FORMATTING IN WORD HOW TO#
Here’s how to set up AutoCorrect to convert co2 into CO 2 (these instructions work for Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010): Wouldn’t it be nice to just type co2 and automatically have Word turn it into CO 2? That’s the sort of thing AutoCorrect was designed for.
That’s at least five, possibly ten or more, actions you had to complete just to get the chemical symbol for carbon dioxide! Multiply that by how many times you have to add CO 2 to your document and you can see that you will spend a lot of time just getting this one chemical symbol correctly formatted. To type this in your document, you have to hold down the Shift key while typing C and O, then release Shift to type the 2 and a following space, then use one of several methods to subscript the 2 (you type the space before subscripting the 2 otherwise the text to follow is also subscripted!). Many of the documents I’m editing contain chemical notations - for example: CO 2, H 2S, O 3, and the like. Let me give you some examples based on some work I’m doing now. (NOTE: AutoCorrect has a 256-character limit, including spaces, punctuation, etc.) The power is in setting up whole strings of text that get generated just by a couple of letters, or in setting up text formatted just the way you want. Simple typo corrections are easy to set up (see this blog post for how to do so: ). Word already has a default set of auto corrections, and you can add your own. Hidden, because many Word users don’t know it exists, or, if they know it exists, think that it’s just for fixing a typo like ‘teh’ by changing it to ‘the’.īut there’s so much more to AutoCorrect than just fixing common typos. Word’s AutoCorrect is one of its hidden gems.