Letting AutoFormat Do the Work

AutoFormat is a great feature that sometimes gets a bad rap. AutoFormat can help you by automatically adding bullets to your lists as you type, changing heading styles, numbering steps, changing quotes and dashes, and more. But because AutoFormat is occasionally over- eager , changing what you d rather not have changed, some people prefer to turn off the feature completely and format things by hand. I think the best way to handle Auto-Format is to teach it to do what you want it to do. You do this by setting the AutoFormat options you prefer.

AutoFormat is turned on by default when you begin working with Word. To display the AutoFormat dialog box (shown in Figure 5-1), choose AutoFormat from the Format menu.

Figure 5-1: You can have Word do a quick AutoFormat based on the document style you select.

The two primary choices in the AutoFormat dialog box allow you to determine how you want the formatting to be done. If you want Word to go through the whole document and make any changes that are needed, leave AutoFormat Now selected. If you want Word to alert you about each formatting change before it is made and give you the option of accepting or rejecting the change, click AutoFormat And Review Each Change. When you click OK, AutoFormatting begins.

Note  

Word gives you the option of applying AutoFormat choices based on the kind of document you are creating. The General Document option is selected by default, but you can click the down arrow and choose Letter or E-mail instead.

Controlling AutoFormat

Depending on the nature of your document and how specialized your formats need to be, you may want to turn off some of the AutoFormat features so they aren t carried out automatically. Here s how to do that:

1. Click Options in the AutoFormat dialog box.

2. On the AutoFormat tab, click the check box of any AutoFormat option you want to turn off to clear it. Table 5-1 presents the different AutoFormat options.

3. Click OK to accept your change, and then click OK again in the AutoFormat dialog box to return to your document.

   Table 5.1: AutoFormat Options

   Option	Description
   Built-In Heading Styles	Applies the default headline styles for the current document
   Automatic Bulleted Lists	Turns a list into a bulleted list automatically
   List Styles	Applies list styles used in the current document
   Other Paragraph Styles	Formats the paragraphs in your document according to styles in your current document
   "Straight Quotes" With Smart Quotes	Replaces double-prime characters (quotation marks that are vertical) with open and close quotation marks, which are curly
   Ordinals With Superscript	Formats ordinals to be superscript above and to the right of the number (1 st , 2 nd , 3 rd )
   Fractions (1/2) With Fraction Character ( ½)	Formats full- size fractions (2/3) to single-character size ( 2 /3)
   Hyphens (--) With Dash ( ”)	Replaces two hyphens in a row typed from the keyboard with a longer dash character
   *Bold* And _Italic_ With Real Formatting	Boldfaces text you type surrounded by asterisks and italicizes text you enclose in underscores
   Internet And Network Paths With Hyperlinks	Recognizes URLs and network paths and creates hyperlinks automatically
   Preserve Styles	When the autoformat is done, keeps any styles applied in the current document
   Plain Text Wordmail Documents	Causes any e-mail messages you open in Word to be displayed in an e-mail format

Disabling AutoFormat

If you decide that you re really a do-it-yourself kind of person and you d rather have AutoFormat turned off completely, you can disable the feature. Just display the AutoFormat tab (click Options in the AutoFormat dialog box) and clear all the check boxes by clicking the ones displaying check marks. Additionally, click the AutoFormat As You Type tab and clear those check boxes as well. When you click OK to return to your document, AutoFormat features will be turned off and all the formatting will be left up to you. Even if you disable AutoFormat, there is another kind of AutoFormat that is available to you: Table AutoFormat. You ll learn more about that feature in the section entitled Using Table AutoFormat, later in this chapter.