AutoCorrect in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

The AutoCorrect feature in PowerPoint fixes a number of common typos and spelling errors within your slides, automatically as you type any text. AutoCorrect also lets you map specific keyboard sequences to a symbol, such as replacing two end dashes with an em dash the moment you hit the Enter key after the second en dash. The best feature within AutoCorrect is that it works so seamlessly that you may not even know that it is working behind the scenes. And this unawareness about AutoCorrect can ironically also cause some problems! You may for example not want the two en dashes to automatically change to an em dash. In this tutorial you will learn how you can take advantage of AutoCorrect, and also how you can override its options as required.

To see how AutoCorrect works, follow these steps in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac:

1. Launch PowerPoint, and insert a new slide to a new or existing presentation. Make sure that your slide layout is Title and Content or any other layout that contains a text placeholder.
2. Within the text placeholder, try typing some misspelled words, and watch how AutoCorrect rectifies mistakes:

Spelling Errors

3. Type teh as shown in Figure 1.
4. 
   Figure 1: The word teh, typed on the slide
5. And, then press the Spacebar on your keyboard thereafter. AutoCorrect replaces teh with its correct spelling, The as shown in Figure 2.
6. 
   Figure 2: AutoCorrect replaces teh to The

Capitalization

7. Note that, other than correcting the spelling (refer to Figure 2), PowerPoint also capitalized the T in the, since T is the first letter of your sentence. Similarly, the word I is always autocorrected to be capitalized—even though, it may not be the first letter of a sentence.

Symbols

8. Need some symbol text such as a Trademark (TM) symbol? You can type (tm) and the trademark symbol ™ would be entered. Similarly, type (c) to insert ©, and (r) to insert ®.

Long Text

9. If you need to repeatedly enter a phrase, you can set up the program to automatically enter this phrase when you type some text of the phrase. To learn more about how you can create your own AutoCorrect entries, refer to our Creating and Editing AutoCorrect Entries in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac tutorial.
3. If you end up with an AutoCorrect version of some text that you don't want to be changed, you can quickly press the ⌘ + Z shortcut key to undo the AutoCorrect action.
4. Save your presentation often.