As a virtual assistant one of the things I get to do a lot of is type….. whether it’s reports, pages of a book, presentations, you name it I type it 🙂

I’ve never been a huge fan of Word – I’m more of a spreadsheet kind of girl, but I have to admit that Word 2007 is beginning to change me!  Gone are the endless drop down menus from the 2003 version that you had to trawl through to find things…..

Instead, Microsoft has it’s own button where you can customise everything to your hearts content 🙂  This button is located in the top left corner of the screen and is visible the whole time an application is open.

When you click on the Office Button, it will bring up a menu where you can choose print, save, open etc – click on the Options button in the bottom right corner.

This opens up a menu for you to go through and customise everything you want to from the colour scheme of the actual ribbon to how often you want the auto-recover to save the document.  I’ve changed the colour scheme for all my Microsoft applications to black, which is why my screenshots may look slightly different to yours!  For this post, we’re concentrating on the Proofing options.

Here, you can customise how you want the spellcheck and autocorrect to work.  If you click on AutoCorrect Options, it brings up a handy little menu where you can add words that you know you always spell incorrectly.  For example, if you know that you always type wieght instead of weight, you can add this to the autocorrect so it will automatically change it to the correct spelling.  One of the typos I’m always making is “the” – I’m forever typing “teh” instead just because my fingers can’t keep up with my brain 😉  So, I’ve set up Word to automatically correct this, instead of flagging it up and me having to change it at the end.

You can also change the formatting as you type.  Fractions are a good example of this – when you type in 1/2 it will automatically change to the fraction half.

I know everybody’s different, so have a play around with the different options and customise it just the way you want it.  Remember though, that everything you change in here will automatically apply to all Word documents you open or create from now on!