It’s a mostly-invisible features that is under-appreciated. But it does a lot, like:
[ul]
[li]Correcting common misspellings/typos: “the” becomes “the,” “friend” becomes “friend,” etc.[/li][li]Adding uncommon letters: “pho” becomes “phở” “resume” becomes “résumé” (which was tricky since “resume” is an actual word, so I type an extra e at the end when I want résumé), etc.[/li][li]Adding lengthy bits of text that are often repeated: when I type the numbers of my home address, it’s replaced with the numbers plus the street name, etc.[/li][li]Pranks: I set up an entry to change “mother” to “mommy” on a friend’s machine (purposefully choosing a word that would almost never appear in business correspondence). I never heard anything from him so I assumed he never noticed, or noticed and fixed it. So I forgot about it; about six months later he called and asked if I’d done something. It took me a few minutes, and I had a good laugh. Then he told me the rest of the story: He’d been noticing it for a while but thought he was having a Freudian issue where he thought “mother” but typed “mommy.” He even got a response from his mom at one point, saying how sweet it he thought it was that he called her “mommy.” He finally happened to be looking at the screen and saw it change. (And yes, I started this thread in part to brag about how clever I am.)[/li][/ul]
So, to the unknown programmers who created autocorrect, and those that have improved on it, I tip my hat to you.
Does it also make “potato” become “potato” and “tomato” become “tomato”?
Only in Oregon and Nevada.
I’m assuming that this means that “teh” becomes “the” and “freind” becomes “friend”, since it makes no sense otherwise.
I sometimes hate autocorrect. One example is when Excel is given text like “01-02” and assumes that I mean January 2nd, even when I just told it that group of cells contains text, dammit, not dates.
Oh, Jebus does that crap annoy me.
You are correct. My proofreading skills ain’t what they used to be, I thought I’d checked those. And in part I can blame it on Autocorrect. The irony…
Try '01-02. That’s an apostrophe.
I use autocorrect as a sort of fast macro-thingy. I choose a sequence of letters or numbers that I would never otherwise intentionally type, and define them to mean whatever I choose.
E.g., “feeagmt” is a popular but not-always-used clause which is inserted as the first paragraph of a fee agreement letter. “sigblock” is used when I want to insert my own signature block instead an existing one in a copied-and-created letter from another author. “LL” is Landlord, “bux” is whatever sum which is typed over and over again in a series of loan documents (like “One Hundred Thousand and no/100ths Dollars ($100,000.00)”).
Easy-peasy and saves a buttload of time.
Thanks – I hadn’t thought of that. I just played around with it, doing some of the operations that usually do in Excel, like Replace, and putting ’ at the start of the text string does keep it as text.