Many things have changed over time. This is also the case for Office applications such as Word, Excel, Outlook and what else is there (The Office System as we know it today is a huge suite of applications and the number of applications available is depending on the SKU – home, professional, business).

One of the things changed is that the toolbars and menus have changed into the Fluent UI also known as “The Ribbon”. Some applications (Word, Excel) moved to The Ribbon with version 2007, others (Outlook - partially, SharePoint tools) with version 2010.

The purpose of The Ribbon was to make it easier for the user of the application to find, but most of all to use all features available in the specific application. Research showed that the end user was not aware that certain features they requested were already implemented and available in their existing toolset.

There are however some features that in previous were easier to find and now a bit harder to discover. One of the items, I think, is the location of the AutoCorrect Dialog.

With Word 2010 you can reach the AutoCorrect Dialog like this:

 

First you click the File menu tab, Select Options, Select Proofing, Click the AutoCorrect Options and there it is … The AutoCorrect Dialog.

The Office team with the introduction of The Ribbon promised us however that they would keep the shortcut key combinations that we all learned and loved before The Ribbon entered our lives. So when you think of that it is easy to think of a quicker option to show you the AutoCorrect Dialog. And the Magic Trick is:

Alt-T-A (Alt for Menu’s, T for Tools, and A for AutoCorrect)

Word doesn’t have a highlighter for the Alt-T combo but it will show you a little box:

Now with only these few buttons you are able to bring up your AutoCorrect Dialog in no time (Remember if your application is in a different locale the key combi might be a bit different depending on the words used in the menus before version 2007)!