Take the Drudgery Out of Typing, via AutoCorrect Microsoft calls the AutoCorrect function in Office 2000 and later "the proofreader over your shoulder." Usually this handy feature performs on-the-fly fixes of common typing and spelling errors, but it often inserts words or replaces ones you don't want changed, such as proper names. Then it seems more like "the noodge over your shoulder." On the other hand, you can use this feature to automate text insertion in Word. Start by highlighting a phrase, sentence, paragraph, or whole document that you regularly need to enter in other Word files. Click Tools, AutoCorrect Options. In the bottom half of the AutoCorrect tab, you'll see all or a portion of what you highlighted. Enter the keystrokes you'll use to trigger the auto-insertion of the highlighted passage -- say, addr for your return address; they'll appear to the left of the passage under 'Replace'. Select Plain text or Formatted text above the passage (if available), to reflect how you want the end result to look. Click Add, and AutoCorrect will place your trigger letters alphabetically among your listed existing shortcut entries. Finish by clicking OK or Close. To enter the text in a Word document, type your trigger letters and activate the text insertion by pressing either the spacebar or Enter, or by typing a punctuation mark (which will be added to your boilerplate text). Note: If you are prompted when exiting Word to accept the changes made to the global template, normal.dot, click Yes, or the AutoCorrect shortcuts you created during that session will be lost. AutoCorrect also works in Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint, though you can't preselect text in these apps and have it appear automatically in the 'Replace' box. You can save your auto-typing as plain text or formatted text, and there's no practical limit on the length of the text. In Word and Outlook, AutoCorrect lets you add graphics, too. To remove the autotyping entry, just reopen the AutoCorrect dialog box, highlight the letters that trigger the shortcut, and click Delete. The Non-Macro 'Macro' If you're just looking for a quick way to insert a chunk of text -- to see, say, how many words in a given font can fill a space -- macros come in handy. The brain behind macros is Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications, a programming language. Even if you use the auto-macro recorder in Word and Excel frequently (click Tools, Macro, Record New Macro), just the idea of VBA may be off-putting. The macro recorder serves as a buffer, hiding Visual Basic code from you during and after creation of a macro. Unless you press Alt-F11 or select Tools, Macro, Visual Basic Editor, you will never see this programming language, despite the fact that it's always on in the background. For example, here's a nifty Word command to create dummy text: Open a new Word document, type =rand(1), and press Enter. Up pops a 45-word paragraph, repeating 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.' Simply change the number within the parentheses to repeat the paragraph that many times. This command is also useful if you need to get a word count across multiple pages. It sure beats pasting big blocks of text over and over again, right? For all other formatted boilerplates, though, the AutoCorrect function described above is your best resource. Commands Close at Hand Apart from the key combinations in Word's toolbar menus, the app's keyboard shortcuts are hard to find. That is, unless you use its built-in macro to list them. Select Tools, Macro, Macros (or press Alt-F8) to open the Macros dialog box. Click the 'Macros in' drop-down menu and select Word commands. Type lis and press the Down Arrow to choose ListCommands, and then press Enter. You can open a document that shows all of the keyboard commands in Word, or just the ones for the current menu and keyboard settings. Pick the option you want and click OK. Then either save the document or print a copy for reference (note that the 'All Word commands' option runs about 19 pages long).