In yesterday's Better Business Writing class in Everett, Washington, a woman told a horror story of a "trick" gone wrong in Microsoft Office.
As I remember the story, she had just begun to work on a contract at a large company. When she composed a document on the computer she had been given, she realized that every time she typed management, it automatically changed to idiots. So if she typed, "This program requires approval by management," her sentence would read "This program requires approval by idiots."
Yikes! Sending out that message would have been the end of her contract.
She never told how she got out of that fix--that's not the important part of the story. What is important is that she was not familiar with the Autocorrect feature in Microsoft Office, so when she saw idiots, she thought her computer had been possessed by demons. It scared her out of her cubicle.
It scares me to think that people might not be using Autocorrect. It's a feature that can save you time and embarrassment by replacing the words you typed with the ones you meant. For example, it corrects me when I type manger for manager and pubic for public--embarrassing things I used to do often.
And then there's Autotext. It saves me time because instead of having to type Lynn Gaertner-Johnston (my long name filled with letter combinations that lead to typos), I just type Lynn and my whole name appears. Instead of having to type Weyerhaeuser, one of my clients whose name is difficult to spell, I just type Weye and the whole name appears, spelled correctly.
In yesterday's business writing class, a woman decided she is going to have Autotext complete her long email address for her, and she easily created an Autocorrect entry for tahnks, her fingers' version of thanks. A man decided he would stop typing the 17-letter name of his company--and have Autotext do it for him.
