This blog is part of a series on transcription. If you haven’t read the other blogs in this series, make sure to check out the summary page for a listing of all transcription blogs.
As I already said, AutoCorrect is a free program that comes with Word–no extra work has to be done to use it; if you have Word, you are set to go. (If you use Open Office, the same basic principles apply, although the set-up is going to be slightly different.)
The upside to using AutoCorrect is that it is free; the downside is that its limitations are large, and it is also easily corruptible. Microsoft only guarantees that the program will support a few thousand entries, and anything put in beyond that may cause the program to become unstable. I have heard a lot of complaints where someone’s AutoCorrect started flipping out and either completely deleting all entries that had been previously put in, or deleting random entries without any rhyme or reason to it. People think that there is no way they could ever put in thousands of entries, and so they don’t worry about it. To that school of thought I say: I had some outrageous amount of entries in my Instant Text while going to Career Step, something like 40,000. It’s been a while, but that’s fairly close. A few thousand entries is much easier to hit than you would think. And the devastation of having all of your hard work disappear in the night is pretty overwhelming.
It’s not all bad news though; if you want to use AutoCorrect while in school, you can back the file up so that if it starts to go wonky, you can restore the file.
To back up AutoCorrect:
1. Right-click the Start button and select Find (Search in Win XP).
2. Type *.acl (asterisk dot acl) in the Name box.
3. Change the Look in box to your main drive.
4. Click Find/Search Now.
5. When the .acl files appear in the search window, right-click the correct file and select “Send To” to copy the file to your floppy/Zip/CD.
Thanks to Cheryl Flanders for those directions.
If you want to practice putting in a phrase to expand out, do the following steps:
1. Open Word.
2. Go to Tools.
3. Go down to AutoCorrect Options.
4. In the box that says “Replace:” put in “Hava”. In the “With:” box, put in “Hava is the best blogger in the whole world.”
5. Hit Add, then Okay.
6. Type “Hava” and hit the space bar. You will now see “Hava is the best blogger in the whole world” appear on your screen.
Wow! I just saw what you typed. You really think so? Aww shucks, thanks. *blush* You’re too kind.
So now you’re an expanding expert. Except remember how I mentioned AutoCorrect has limitations? They are large, and they are very real. First off, from now on, when you type Hava, you are going to get that entire sentence, and there is no way to avoid that. If you hit enter, the whole sentence appears. If you put a semi-colon after Hava; it will appear. If you put a comma after Hava, the whole sentence will still appear. Yes, there is a pattern here, you are 100% correct. One thing people have done to get around this is instead of adding Hava into the AutoCorrect feature, they instead add Hava/. Then when they want it to expand out, they use Hava/, and if they want just the word, they use Hava. This of course can work with any symbol: / ‘ ]\ you get the point. Even with this change, the fact remains that you cannot see what you are expanding out before you type the words. “tp” may stand for “the patient” or it may stand for “toilet paper.” You don’t know until you type it.
For these reasons and others that I haven’t mentioned yet, AutoCorrect is a great way to dip your toe in the expander world, but definitely isn’t the way to go for the long haul. No fear, next blog I will be discussing Instant Text and what it has to offer.