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Microsoft Word is probably the most popular word processing application in use today. It comes with the Office 365\Microsoft 365 subscription and can be run as a standalone program or even used for free by using the Microsoft 365 for the web version.
One issue that many people have when using Microsoft Word is that it tends to format your text for you automatically as you are working on your document. This can be helpful in some cases but for many people, it can be more of a burden because they do not want to have these formatting changes applied to their computer and then they have to correct or reverse the changes that Word made to their document. In this article, we will be showing you how to adjust Microsoft Word auto format as you type options so you can decide what changes are made automatically for you.
The image below shows some of the typical auto format as you type changes that Word will make as you type. As you can see, Word puts the st from 1st as superscript rather than keeping it the same size as the rest of the text. It will also automatically create a numbered list if you type a number before some text. When you type a dash and press enter, Word will change it to a longer double dash as well. For fractions, Word will change them so the top number is over the bottom number. Then for links, Word will create clickable hyperlinks rather than just leave it unformatted text.
To disable one or more of the auto format features, you can go to the Word settings by clicking on the File tab and then choosing Options. From there, click on the Proofing section at the left and then click on the AutoCorrect Options button.
Next, click on the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Here you will see various formatting options that you can disable as needed. As you can see, there is a check box that can disable each of the auto formatting features that you saw in the sample text at the beginning of this article.
Once we disable the auto format options that were affecting our previous text, we can type it again and as you can see, nothing gets changed and we have only simple unformatted text.
Another feature many people don’t like is when Microsoft Word finishes their sentences for them. Fortunately, it’s easy to disable or turn off predictive text in Word to solve that problem.
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