Writing the first drafts of my two books in Microsoft Word, I’ve been able to save myself a great deal of time by creating auto-replace shortcuts for my main characters. If my main characters had names like Ben or Mae, this isn’t a problem. But my most of my characters have longer names and with a documents that exceed 200 single-spaced pages, that’s a lot of unnecessary typing.
I assigned two-letter codes to all my main characters. For example:
dy automatically turns into Jody
ne automatically turns into Natalie
Here’s how:
1. Click on the Tools menu
2. Click on the AutoCorrect option
3. Make sure “replace text as you type” toggle is on
4. Pick your code, type it in the “replace” box
5. Type the full word into the “with” box (the word must be exactly as you want it to appear, including capitalization)
6. Press the “Add” button, then either add another word, or click “okay” at the bottom of the window
In doing this, you must be sure your abbreviations aren’t common words. For a third character in the same book, I used the abbreviation cd for Candace. This has been a problem in every other Microsoft Word Document when I mean to write the abbreviation for compact disc. Suddenly I have a sentence like this: I bought the new Green Day Candace at Barnes and Noble yesterday.
You don’t have to be writing a book to use this tip. It could be useful for someone with a long last name. A person named Peggy Zimmerman-Kapowski could be typing zk instead. Or, someone working on a botany thesis on the pineapple weeds could use mm instead of the pineapple weed’s Latin name, Matricaria matricarioides.
