Autocorrect initial capital and date autotext

[Ricki Miles]

I am working in Word 2003. I have two questions:

When I type a paragraph such as "This happened in the first quarter of 2005.
A review will follow." , even though I have "Capitalize first letter of
sentences" set to happen in Autocorrect, the letter "a" in the second
sentence does not capitalize. There is no exception listed for numbers in
my Exceptions list.

When I type "April 13, 2005" as soon as I type the "5" of 2005, I get an
autotext completion showing on screen with 2005-04-13(Press Enter to
insert )- which I do not want. Is there any way to eliminate just this one
autotext?

Thanks very much,

Ricki

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Put both down to Word annoyances that you can't do anything about so you
might as well not waste energy trying.

The latter is one that some unfortunate users are plagued with and others
not (I'm one of the lucky ones). The only workarounds are to (a) press
Spacebar or Escape before pressing Enter or Tab when you get the
AutoComplete tip or (b) set up templates with a date field (CREATEDATE,
usually) already in them so that you don't have to type the date.

As for the former, it is "by design" (and you don't need to point out to me
what a dumb design this is). See “Word does not capitalize the first letter
of a sentence” at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291538. The best I can
surmise, many users complained about numbered lists being capitalized even
when they didn't want them to be. So Word's designers were told to create an
exception for this. Unfortunately, the exception (which some users don't
like in the first place) also extends to text following numbers in running
text, not just autonumbered lists.

 

[Ricki Miles]

Thank you so much for your response. I won't waste any more time on these
issues - but I do wonder why some people do not get that date autotext and
some do.....

Thanks,

Ricki

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I don't know. Some UK users seem to be prone to it, so perhaps it's a UK
English issue. They try to blame it on us USians, claiming it's a US date
format, which it emphatically isn't. Actually it's an ISO standard adopted
by some companies (here and in Europe) but by no means universally popular.