Make up for your bad typing with AutoCorrect

I’ll admit it: I am not a world-class typist. I can do about 85-90 on a good-to-average day, but years of working with word processors has made my error rate a little dodgy.

And I’ve noticed, over the years, that no matter how much typing practice I get, there are a few words I misspell (really, mistype — I actually do know how to spell them!) frequently. That annoys me. A lot.

But taking the advice of my fellow blogger Vivian Manning, I’m going to stop obsessing about typos and let the computer do more of the work for me. Because if the machines can do more work, why not let them? And because not many people know how to get Microsoft Word to correct their common typos, I’m going to show you how. (Because I want you to do less busywork, too!)

Click the link below to learn how.

Reader Question: How to automatically number your discovery requests … in 5 keystrokes

If your law firm does litigation work, you’ve probably prepared lots of discovery. And you may have wondered if there’s any way you can avoid typing the phrase “Interrogatory No. X” in Microsoft Word over and over again and get that X to be an automatically incrementing number. If so, the answer is, yes, you can!

Click through for a complete tutorial on how to use field codes in Microsoft Word to automatically number interrogatories, requests for production, requests for admission, or other legal discovery.

In praise of text expansion (or, how to keep from typing the same thing 100 times)

If you find yourself stuck typing “Brief in Support of American Amalgamated Consolidated Widget Corporation’s Second Amended Motion for Leave of Court to Conduct On-site Inspection” for the umpteenth time, let me show you how to get out of all that repetitive typing. It’s a concept called “text expansion”, and you don’t even need extra software to do it. Click the link below to learn how to use this feature in Microsoft Word.

Reader Question: Copying WordPerfect footnotes to Microsoft Word

You know how I’m always telling you that the best way to get your old WordPerfect text into a new Microsoft Word document is to just copy it over? Well, that’s not always the case. Sometimes Microsoft Word doesn’t “translate” WordPerfect text into just the right Microsoft Word equivalent. A reader pointed out that doing a straight copy of WordPerfect footnotes into Word makes the numbering sequence go all wonky. Click the title above to find out how to copy those footnotes so you don’t spend forever fixing them. (Oh, and look at the very bottom of the tutorial. You’ll see a section that says “Members Only” which contains a link to a downloadable pdf version. If you don’t see the link, go to https://legalofficeguru.com/login and put in your user id [your email address] and password.)

Reader Question: Type Once, Repeat Many?

A Legal Office Guru reader wrote in, asking for help with some forms she’d been asked to create to . “Is there a way to autopopulate a field?” she asked. “I’d like it to work similar to Adobe [Acrobat], where if you give the fields the same name, the text in one will automatically fill up in all of the others. I’ve read something about making each field an REF field, but I don’t understand how to do it, and I’ve tried tons of Google search results. Can you help?”

To achieve that Adobe-like effect, I’d choose Word’s Bookmarks feature. Click the “Read More” link below for the full illustrated tutorial.

Customizing the Status Bar

There’s a whole host of ways you can make the various Microsoft Office applications easier to use. In fact, most users don’t take full advantage of the options for customizing these applications to make the Office suite work better for them.

Today, we’re going to talk about one of the easiest customizations: the Status Bar.

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