New Video Series Introduces You to InDesign's Secretarial Skills

Anne-Marie Concepcion

You may not have realized that InDesign can auto-correct words as you type them. That feature has been around for years, but you have to turn it on by going to Edit > Preferences > Autorrect (Windows) or InDesign > Preferences > Autorrect (Mac) and checking “Enable autocorrect”. The keyboards shortcut is Ctrl/Cmd-K.
InDesign’s auto-correct comes with a long list of commonly misspelled words already programmed in. You can view that list and edit it. You can even add to the list, and that’s where the savvy user can turn InDesign into a robot secretary.
Say that you often have to type in a long phrase; for example, “University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign”. You can tell InDesign’s auto-correct to enter that mouthful whenever you type a short code word, such as “uil”, and follow the code word with a period, space, colon, or other character indicating that you’re done writing this word, not beginning a word that starts with “uil”. From now on, autocorrect will automatically expand “uil” into “University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign”.
There are a few rules to keep in mind: Autocorrect (and its auto-expansion power) applies only to words you type by hand. It doesn’t affect text you import or paste or place. There’s a 64-character limit, and autocorrect doesn’t retain multiple lines or formatting.
Watch the video below for more details. This is the first in a new series on lynda.com, “InDesign Secrets“:

If you don’t like to type words, you may not want to do math yourself, either. Members of the lynda.com Online Training Library can watch David Blatner’s video, “Letting InDesign do the math for you“. It’s the second video in the lynda.com “InDesign Secrets” series.