Setting up your own Autocorrect in InDesign

Hi there, welcome back to another installment of Creative Quick Tips. My name is Justin Seely, and today we're going to be talking about InDesign. And more specifically, how to set up your own autocorrect inside of InDesign. Now if you're a mobile user, whether it's an iPhone, an Android tablet, whatever the case may be. You're probably used to some form of autocorrect, and unfortunately for us as a society, it's become sort of a crippling thing, I expect for my computer to autocorrect things as I mistype them in various applications.

I've also grown quite accustomed to the little shortcuts that I've set up on my phone. For instance when I type in, like, O-M-W, I want it to say on my way, or something like that, and so I want that kind of capabilities in my desktop applications, and lucky for us, InDesign allows you to do just that. So on the Mac, you're going to go up to the InDesign menu, on the PC you'll go up to the Edit menu, find the Preferences section, and then inside of Preferences you're going to go down to Autocorrect. And once you're inside of the Autocorrect section of the Preferences, go ahead and enable Autocorrect, and then you will start to see a long list of things that it will automatically autocorrect for you.

And a lot of these are just common misspellings that people make all the time, that InDesign will then try to take care of for you. But what you may not know, is that down here at the bottom, you can actually add in your own. So the misspelled word, for instance. Let's say that I am tired of typing out lynda.com. Well, I'll just type it L-D-C, and the correction will be lynda.com. Hit OK, and that has been added in. Now, I can add in another one. So, let's say I wanted my name. I'll type out J-S-S. Those are my initials, and so then I would type out Justin Seely and hit OK.

And so once we do that, if I hit OK I can now come out here and I can create a text box. And then as I start to type, let me zoom in a little bit so you can see this. As I type out LDC, it will automatically, once I press the spacebar, add in lynda.com. If I type out JSS and hit the spacebar, it's automatically going to put in my name. So, you could come up with your own form of shorthand for this autocorrect, and also just turning it on is going to help alleviate a lot of different spelling issues for you. Now, that's not to say that this might not be a hindrance.

We've all seen autocorrect fails online, so you do have to pay attention to what you're typing at all times. But this is just a great way of helping you automate your workflow a little bit, and making it a little bit easier to get data entry into a program like In Design. No matter what it is that you're trying to shorthand, go ahead and set up your own autocorrect inside of InDesign. See if it doesn't work for you, help speed things up for you a little bit.