I am experiencing problems using Autoformat as you type.


I am not able to achieve the following effects:

• headers (levels 1,2,3) selected by enters and tabs.
• date conversion.
• system tracking and 'learning' my formats. I am not too clear what this is meant to do, but it sounds an appealing feature.

I have all the options set in Autoformat as you type.


It doesn't seem to make any difference whether or not I have Keep track of formatting checked,.

This is odd because in the past level 1 headers and date conversions seemed to work. Is there some subtle interaction?

I find that some Autoformat as you type features work fine: ordinals, bold, italic, brackets, quotation marks, quotes, lists of various types, indented paragraphs and indented first lines.

EDIT: The dates seem to be recognised correctly as dates: it is just that the format does not change.
The headers are not recognised as headers.

Regarding the headings...
This is a little embarrassing!
To be processed in this way, the heading must have an initial capital.
I just didn't think to bother with this for testing.

I would still like help regarding the date conversion.
I have vague recollections that there is an option somewhere, possibly to do with styles, to set whether or not dates are converted, but I can't find it now.

I also continue to be very intrigued by the format tracking option.
As I vaguely understand it,
either
you make some small formatting change, and the system assigns a standard style to it.
or
the system looks back at the styles you have used, and assigns the closest one.
I would really appreciate some illucidation on this.

Regarding the dates...
It seems that something is getting in first and processing my dates.
This is not Autoformat as you type (tried turning off the date option) and this is not Smart Tags (turned off). There are no date-related macros.

It does the following:-
(Note today is the 16th March 2011, and I am in the UK.)
I type "2011", it prompts for "2011-03-16".
I type "16 Mar" it prompts for "16 Mar. 11".
I type "16/03" it prompts for "16/03/11".
If I hit enter, I get the prompted replacement, space and there is no replacement.
This always involves today's date: no other date.
What is it that is doing this?

I have some disabled add-ins, and thought one of these may be causing the problem, but no, I ran the Word in no add-ins mode, and it was still the same date behaviour.

Also, does anyone know about the alleged "format tracking" behaviour of Autoformat as you type? I can see that such a pattern-matching behaviour could be very valuable for people who like to dive into things.

I would really appreciate it if someone could give me a precise example of Autoformat while you type (AWYT) in the mode where the system intuits the format to apply from what has gone before (so-called format tracking).

I mean an example that tells me:

• Exactly what I type, to get things started.
• What I type to provide enough of a signature to signal a change in formatting.
• What I should observe, as the result of the additional format or style settings that the system has made.

This facility is mentioned in a number of Microsoft despatches, but none I have encountered so far has an easily verified and practical example of the type I have asked for here.

There is even a suspicion that the facility does not exist or has never worked, but there is a reluctance to admit it.

(Note that this is totally distinct from the Heading, enter, enter format and tab, Heading, enter, enter format and tab, tab, Heading, enter, enter format which work fine and are also very useful.)

Cognate point:
It is commonplace in computer packages that when a special character is given a special meaning, there is also an escape or literalising character defined, often backslash or escape, to take away the special meaning. The point being that this is typed, so need not slow down the speed of typing (which was the objective of the whole exercise, remember).

So a worthwhile question is: Is there such a character defined for Word 2007 Autoformat as you type? (I haven't found one.)

One suggestion: Choose some character on your keyboard that you rarely use as an 'escaping character', maybe ¬ might be a good candidate. Use this to destroy the context producing the special effect eg ¬*xyz* or ¬1. or ¬Heading or ¬--- (but not ¬1st). Then do a global edit at the end of the typing session to replace the escaping characters by nothing.

Otherwise use Customize to place the Autoformat As You Type icon on the Quick Access Toolbar, so the relevant options can be changed at a sensible pace.

Cognate point:
Can I have an English example of Insert closing phrase to match memo style.
How do I signal that I am at the end?

I may have found the meaning for this option on the internet, from the following University of Wisconsin Eau Claire source:

www.uwec.edu/help/Word07/AUTO-fmtastp.htm

This states:



This is not, it seems, some amazing AI-inspired way of formatting a document heuristically!

What it does do is the following:

If you apply some formatting changes to some text, the text appears in the Style Menu, formatted with said formatting changes.
So you can select the style as a whole in one mouse operation for some other text.
This makes it easier and quicker to get exactly the same format.
It means, if you wish, you can ignore the inbuilt styles of heading 1 etc, and simply martial your own styles by example, without ever giving them names.

This is powerful if you like to design documents on a one-off basis, by refining their appearance.

One may not have realised that Autoformat is required to produce this effect.

I think it is worthwhile to explore to what extent Autoformat as you type is useable and useful for documents that are pure unicode text or unicode programming source code.

(I am assuming that the file is saved in a text format with a unicode option such as utf-8 selected. Source code needs the file extension changing from .txt outside Word.)

Effects that are implemented with unicode characters (including the common ASCII characters) will still work in a text environment.

The effects that are still available include:

• matching parentheses.
• smart quotes
• fractions
• bulleted lists
• numbered lists
• extended dashes
• smileys
• first line indents

At the present time, many compilers accept arbitrary unicode characters in comments and string literals. There are certain effects very likely to crop up in non-literal source code that most likely one definitely doesn't want to obtain by accident:

1. smart quotes
2. extended dashes
3. fractions
4. smileys

(1) and (2) are particularly insideous, because one may not notice their presence, and one may spend many frustrating hours debugging before realising the cause!

One can turn off these options, or have a vb-macro turn them on and off. Or one can have a cleanup vb-macro that recognises non-comment non-literal text and replaces the offending characters by the more sedate alternatives, and flags anything else non-ASCII.

Note that where permitted, one does want smart quotes and extended dashes in string literals.

There are plentry of opportunities to use autocorrect and building blocks as a (non-parameterized) text substitution processor (macro processor - definition sense) for executable source code as well as for text.