It’s enough to make you want to tear your hair out. One moment you’re typing away happily and the next Word has interpreted your typing as some sort of command to launch a space probe to Pluto. Or something just as confusing. Undoing AutoFormatting One easy way to temporarily reverse what Word has done is to watch out for the lightning bolt sign that will appear next to the text that Word has AutoFormatted. If you click that icon you will see options to Undo the action just this time, or to stop Word doing the action altogether. If you miss the lightning bolt icon (it disappears if you keep typing), hover your mouse pointer over the text that was changed and it might reappear (if Word is not on a tea break). If not, click Undo (or press Ctrl and z). This will undo Word’s “AutoFormat” step. If you click the down-arrow next to the Undo button you will see how often Word has been AutoFormatting behind the scenes. How to Turn Off AutoFormat The lightning bolt icon has an option t...

The time has come for you to print off a copy of your manuscript to send out to an editor, but something's gone screwy with Word. Surprise, surprise. Your quick glance through the document found a word that should have been in italics, but wasn't. So you corrected that, only to have your entire document converted into italicised text. Then there's those pesky curly quotes that won't go away. You know your editor wants them straight up, no twist. Here's how to troubleshoot some of the trickier formatting woes. Automatically Updating Styles MS Word's formatting tools have a feature for automatically updating the formatting as you work. This can be very handy if you're using it for a specific style that has a single function (like making notes), but it can also be a right pain if you forget that it is turned on and you start fiddling with the formatting. This is the feature you need to turn off if you find your whole document changing formatting when yo...