AutoFormat

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'AutoFormat' topic. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

Adding Automatic Lines
Want an easy way to add lines in your document? You can do it by making sure Word is using one of its AutoFormat features.

Controlling Automatic Indenting
Are you tired of pressing Tab at the beginning of a line, only to have your whole paragraph indented? Change Word's behavior so that the Tab key works like you expect it to.

Controlling URL Formatting
When you add a URL to a document, Word automatically makes it into a hyperlink. If you don't want Word to do this, follow the instructions in this tip.

Smart Quotes are Incorrectly Replaced
Word uses two types of quotes in a document—regular quotes and smart quotes. There are a couple of ways you can switch between the two types of quotes, but you may be surprised if switching to smart quotes produces less than perfect results. This tip explains why the incorrect results may occur and what you can do to fix them.

Turning Off Automatic Capitalization
When you start typing, do you ever notice those times that Word starts capitalizing words at the start of what it thinks are your sentences? If this drives you nuts, you have complete control over turning it on or off. Here's how.

Updating to Smart Quotes
As you type a document, Word automatically converts your quote marks and apostrophes to "curly" versions that look more professional. When working with a document from a different source that doesn't include these smart quotes, you may want to convert them all so they look the same. This is easy to do simply by using Word's Find and Replace function. This tip explains how.

Using Correct Apostrophes
Word does a pretty good job of figuring out what apostrophes to use around your text. There may be times, however, when it messes up. Here's how to get just the right type of apostrophes before numbers.

Where is AutoFormat?
AutoFormat, a handy feature in many versions of Word, seems to be missing from Word 2007. If you are using the latest version of Word and you want this feature back, here's how to get it.