Yeeccshh. I know exactly what you’re talking about. If anyone knows how to turn this option off, I’d sure love to know. Apparently its possible, but I’ve searched long and hard through the most obscure dialog boxes and have yet to find said option.
There are TWO places you have to turn it off – in the Tools menu, under AutoFormatAsYou Type and AutoFormat. You can turn off one but it’ll still keep doing it unless you turn off both.
And even then it will STILL throw in the Jason tab. That’s Microsoft’s own name for it, apparently. It’s that random tab that appears out of nowhere that even THEY can’t figure out how to get rid of.
I’m an English teacher. Not long ago, I was trying to create a worksheet with some poetry on it. I was, specifically, trying to use Word to transcribe e. e. cummings poetry.
I disabled everything I could find, and still the stupid thing kept auto-correcting to capital letters. I finally gave up and used a typewriter.
I have found that when Word believed it is Its Duty that something Be a Certain Way, the best way to do that is to, for example … okay. You want to type
To get it in all lowercase you have to allow Word to think it has done Its Duty in assuring things Be a Certain Way.
Then, without changing spaces (as those indicate to Word that it must do Its Duty to make sure things Are a Certain Way for that word), you go in and adjust for capitalization etc. Press arrowkeys, use the mouse, something like that. Just DON’T press the spacebar. That’s like your own little “Hey Word, Do Your Duty” call out to the program, and it has more ears than an acre of cornrows.
Similarly, there is a way of defeating the “No, I really know how you want tabs/labeling” (labeling IE A/B/Q/R). Let me see if I can remember it … ::loads Word::
I should warn you that if I end up damaging this computer area I’m holding each of you personally and financially responsible;)
HMM. Word is … not installed on this computer. Wordperfect is. Entirely different beast. Ah, well, let’s see if I can remember.
text … then return twice
SPACE 2. text … then return twice, go back and reset the margin to what it ought to be WITHOUT ERASING THE RETURNS, then erase the space and continue with 3 etc.
I’ll have to try this later to see if it works, but it can be done such that it doesn’t quite result in a barely-suppressible urge to strangle Bill Gates with a bloody Microsoft ™ towel.
FWIW, the autoformat actions enter the undo stack like everything else, so if you hit ctrl-Z it’ll undo the buggers. I find this unnatural, however, as my brain tells me that “undo” will undo the last thing I did, not the last thing I saw happen.
To join the pile-on, I find Word inexplicably bad. I do not want moronic, usually-wrong guesses as to my intentions - I want the control to enable me to put my intentions on paper. I actually went to the lengths of teaching myself LaTeX to do my CV, I got so pissed off with Word. Plus, once you see a properly typeset document using LaTeX, you realise how awful Word’s fundamentals are, like kerning. Yuk.
I just went into Word, opened up Tools/AutoCorrect, unchecked everything on all four tabs under that option – AutoCorrect, AutoFormatAsYouType, AutoText, and AutoFormat – and then proceeded to type all lower case with spaces and hard returns with no problem.
There’s stealth boxes on there you have to hunt for – but if you uncheck everything on ALL those menus, you can do pretty much what you want with Word. Really.
That being said, I hate, hate, HATE Word. I just was forced to learn to use it to a near-expert in a job.
