Taming MS Word’s Infuriating Features

The folks who put together Microsoft Word have my thanks for an excellent product, but I hear from writers and copyeditors who struggle with making it work for them. Many don’t know there’s a quick and easy way to turn off the most maddening features.

Taking twenty minutes to systematically click through the Tools menu can change your life.* Put in your preferences, click Default, click Yes, and you’re done. The settings will stay that way in every future document unless you decide to change them back later. (If you click No, they will stay that way only in the current document.)

For instance, take a look at Tools → Language → Hyphenation. If your computer has been sticking unwanted optional hyphens into your text, here’s the place to turn off that feature.

The formidable Tools → AutoCorrect Options are well worth a visit. Smacking these lists into shape will save you hours of hair-pulling. The two easiest (and most useful) tabs are the ones labeled AutoFormat as You Type and AutoCorrect. That’s where you can tell Word to stop (or start) all kinds of impish messing with your text, such as forcing you to use bullets or superscripts or curly quotation marks where you don’t want them.

The Tools → Options menu lays out some of the most important choices, starting with the Spelling & Grammar tab. If you don’t want little wavy red lines under suspicious words in your document, uncheck the box next to “Check spelling as you type.” Ditto for grammar. In the Edit tab I always turn off “When selecting, automatically select entire word,” which otherwise drives me mad.

It’s possible you’ll be bewildered by quite a few of the options. (“Balance SBCS characters and DBCS characters”?) Either ignore them or type them into Google and find out what they are. (“Not used in U.S. English Word.”)

Who knows—you might discover something you can’t live without.
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*Instructions are for Word 2003. In Word 2007, to turn hyphenation on or off, go to the Ribbon at the top of any document, choose the Page Layout tab, and in the Page Setup group click on Hyphenation. To adjust other settings, click on the colorful Office button in the upper left corner of a document, and then click on Word Options at the bottom. In the Proofing menu, you’ll find Spelling & Grammar and AutoCorrect Options.

Comments

[Jane Rafal Wilson]

Here's a fix to one of the most maddening problems: footnotes that appear at the bottom of the NEXT page instead of the current page. You have to change your line spacing from "double" or "single" to "exactly" 24 or 12 points, or whatever is the correct number for the type size you're using.

[Jane Rafal Wilson]

If you are having problems with unwanted page breaks, go to word options, display, and click "show all formatting marks." This will show you where the page break actually is, so you can then delete it. Then you need to turn off all formatting marks, unless you actually like all those black dots showing every space.(Drives me crazy.) I like to work with paragraph returns and tab characters showing, but nothing else.

[Beth LaMie]

Carol,
What a terrific time-saver! I knew the option to create a new default. I moved to MS Word 2007 and the default is frustratingly different than 2003 was. Even switching to the supposed 2003 template isn't much better. Grrr. Thanks so much for the info!

www.bethlamie.com

[Denys Howard]

Even if you generally like printer quotes, you might want typewriter quotes at times. For example, in a programming code sample or to indicate geographic degrees and minutes. Press ctrl+z right after typing the quote character to revert it to the typewriter version.

[Rianjs]

Technical writers would benefit from mastering Word's use of style-based exemptions from spelling and grammar. I should write up a more detailed how-to blog entry on it with screenshots, but the basic steps are:

1) Edit style
2) Under the "Format" drop down box, select Language
3) Tick the "Do not check spelling or grammar" checkbox

If you're using styles--and you should be!--any style marked in this way will not bother you over spelling and grammar. For example, I have a monospaced font style that I use for code examples. This particular style has absolutely no spelling or grammar checking associated with it because spell-checking Java/C++/F#/whatever code would be ridiculous.

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For specialty writers, especially in the life sciences, creating or buying a specialty dictionary that's separate from your list of user-added words can be a timesaver *and* a lifesaver. When I was in pharmacy school, I started a little side project because I was tired of squiggly red underlines when a word was spelled correctly, and I couldn't afford Stedman's. Over the years it's grown from 5,000 to 35,000 to now somewhere around 66,000 words, thanks largely to the efforts of other users submitting their own word lists for inclusion. Anyway, I gave it a name (LexisMed) and a home on the web. Maybe someone will find it useful:

http://blottedink.net/lexismed

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For all of my writing, I keep a wordlist called "sandbox" that all new entries go into initially. Periodically, I go through it to make sure that the spelling is the best it can be, whereupon I fork the word out of the sandbox and into the appropriate specialty dictionary (LexisMed or my technical writing dictionary). An example that I'd have to check would be NVIDIA: is it nVidia, NVIDIA, or Nvidia? Do I really want the British spelling of this particular disease state, or should I Americanize it? And so on.

[J. Michael Mollohan]

You must be using something prior to Office 2007. The "Tools" menu doesn't exist on Word 2010. You have to go to the "Page Layout" ribbon and cancel the hyphenation, if it's not already disabled. 2010 setup did not initiate hyphenation.
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The Auto-correction options are under the "Review" ribbon.
.
As much as I like Word 2010, the Ribbon scheme that replaced the drop-down menus is completely anti-user. There's a considerable learning curve. What ever happened to manuals?

[Katie Van Heest]

Thank you for the tips. Word is a big topic these days, especially given the recent release of Office 2011 for Mac.

I've been using 2004 because it supports macros, but I do notice that clients are on 2007/2008 at least. With the differences between the menu structure and the ribbon, communicating about certain features can be difficult.

Are you all upgrading to Office 2011 (for Mac)? Or does it just involve more "infuriating features"?

[Rediscoveringgrandma.blogspot.com]

@J. Michael, There's no manual, but there's a great interactive Flash page that lets you find the command you want in 2003 and then shows you where it lives in 2007. (Granted, nobody tells you this and you'd think that if they had to go to that length to make the new version workable, they'd realize perhaps they'd gone too far in one version, but at least they've thrown us a little something.)

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/interactive-word-2003-to-word-2007-command-reference-guide-HA010074432.aspx

[Morgan]

I've just "upgraded" (?) from Word 2003 to 2010, and it is infuriating! Some of the former keystroke commands from 2003 don't work in 2010, and I can't find any reference to keystroke commands in Help. It seems 2010 requires one to use the mouse, which I find infuriating as it is too time-consuming, plus my mindset is that of a production typist. Anyone know the keystroke for Page Set-up? It used to be AltF + U, but that no longer works in 2010. The Flash page link mentioned above does not give keystrokes.

[George Shaddock]

Word for Windows 10 or word 365 has a terrible editor. You may be writing a long fiction story 60,000 words and the editor comes up with something it THINKS is wrong on page 45 so you decide to change the entire paragraph. You cannot highlight the paragraph and have the editor check it again. The editor starts the entire editing process again. This is a clumsy process. When writing dialog "Go and see for yourself." The editor wants it to read "go and ... It doesn't like capitalizing after beginning with quotes. The editor has many glitches and takes much more time. One is forced to purchase a stand alone editor.

[Carol Saller]

George, I hear your frustration! Although Word 365's editor has some powerful and useful features, it can't compete with the best third-party apps.

A suggestion: To check that new paragraph, copy and paste it into a new (temporary) doc and run the editor. Not ideal, but faster than starting all over.