Discussion on:

Office challenge: Why does Word replace ADN with and and how can you make it stop?

Is a funny thing that Word has, is the Autocorrect feature.
Word has the capability to replace suposedly misspelled words for the "correct" one, but is a feature we can trim to our needs. Just, in Word 2007 make a click on the Office Button -> Word options -> Review -> Autocorrect options, and voil??, the complete list with a series of options we can deactivate y required.

place the cursor on the word - a blue line should appear
click on the blue line and click on "step automatically correcting adn.

Is there a way to keep Word from autocorrecting "ADN" while still keeping the "adn" to "and" correction active? Even if you tell Word's autocorrect to ignore upper case words, it still changes ADN to AND. I even added "Replace" AND "With" ADN in the "Replace text as you type" table. Word still changed ADN to AND and didn't replace it with ADN (probably didn't work because the AND was a result of the autocorrect's doings, not my typing?). In Word 2007, under Word Options, Proofing, AutoCorrect Options, I selected Exceptions and, on the Other Corrections tab, I tried to add ADN. Word changes it to the lowercase adn when you add it to the table. Even after all of that, it still corrects ADN to be AND and adn to and. Similarly, under the AutoCorrect options, you can delete the "Replace" adn "With" and in the "Replace text as you type table". This keeps Word from changing ADN to AND, but it also prevents it from changing adn to and. Not what I was looking for. I give up! I'm anxious to find a solution that will leave ADN alone but change adn to and so I could be the bearer of good news for a co-worker whose initials are ADN!

My fix worked only once, then reverted--sorry. Here's a kludgy work-around: type the ampersand instead of "and"; add ["&" replace with "and"] to the auto correct list & also delete the ["adn" replace with "and"]. You'll still have a problem if you type "adn" when you mean "and"-- depends how easily you can change your typing habits. If you need the "&" to show up, it's not a good solution.

Since you didn't say the user wanted Word to keep changing "adn" to "and," they should just go to AutoCorrect ... (under Tools in pre-Robbon versions), highlight "adn" in the replace list, and click the Delete button. Of course, Word will also stop correcting the typo "adn," but that should still be caught w/ the Spellchecker.

If you have set up Auto-Correct to leave "adn" as spelt, when you DO mis-type "and" as "adn", Auto-correct will incorrectly change your mistake.

Set up a new Auto Correct item for AXX (or any letter combination) change to ADN. I have one where I type pcode and autocorrect replaces that with my name, phone number and email address.

If this is an infrequent event, typing ADN, and you can catch it immediately after ending the word, i.e., adding a space, tab, return, or other white space; you can press CTRL-Z to undo the auto-correct.