I was recently writing a story about the use of electronic health records in Indian Country. As I often do when I write, I launched Microsoft Word. I frequently used both the terms Electronic Health Records, or EHR for short, and Indian Health Services, IHS for short. With both of these abbreviations, Word quickly corrected these abbreviations to HER and HIS. Now, the average Word user probably don’t write about EHR systems on a regular basis so it is a safe bet from Microsoft to include these acronyms in their auto-correct database. However, if you do find that Word is frequently attempting to correct certain spelling for you that was intended to be spelled that way, here is a quick lesson on how to edit Word’s AutoCorrect options. These screenshots are from Microsoft Word 2007. The soon to be released Word 2010 may look somewhat different.
Step 1: Click on the red, blue, yellow, and green Office icon in the upper left-hand of your screen. Next you will see the following screen:
Click on Word Options in the lower right part of this screen. This opens up the Word Options screen.
Click on “Proofing”, the third option down on the left side of this screen. This opens up the AutoCorrect screen which looks as follows:
The AutoCorrect screen has several tabs. You want to be on the AutoCorrect tab which it defaults to when you open the AutoCorrect screen. On this tab you can see all the words that Word has been programmed to change. I.e. if you type “imediate” Word will automatically change this to “immediate”. In this list you will find both “EHR” and “IHS”. Simply locate these entries and click the delete button.
This is how simple it is to “re-program” Word’s auto-correct feature. Good luck!