turn off smart quotes in ms word for mac

If you have never heard of them and have already tried your hand at submitting writing for online publication, you are probably already closely acquainted with them without even knowing it.

If you are fortunate enough to learn of this issue early on it will not present much of a problem as it is an easy formatting fix.

If however, you have already written tons of smart quote infested text you are hoping to upload onto the web, things can get a bit more complicated.

Instead of using standard straight quotes, or dumb quotes, Word automatically reformats them and turns them into the curly nuisances we speak of here.

Most likely what will happen is that every instance where an apostrophe or quotation marks are used will be turned into a question mark or some other unsightly character.

The result will be a very unprofessional, unfinished looking article and a very frustrated writer.

Scroll down to Word Options (at the bottom of the box).

Click it. Scroll down to the proofing selection in the new window that just opened up, click it.

Browse the tabs at the top of the box and click on AutoFormat.

Uncheck this box.

If you like you can also uncheck the rest of the boxes save the last one titled internet and network paths with hyperlinks to further uncomplicated any internet formatting issues that you may experience.

Go back up to the tabs at the top of the box and click on the one that says AutoFormat As You Type.

Now simply do the exact same thing you did in step 2 unchecking all of the same boxes here.

There may be an easier way to do this but this seemed the easiest way to me.

I simply used the find feature (just hold ctrl and hit F) in Word to find all of the apostrophes in my article, then all of the quotation marks.

This way the program will bring you to each one, one at a time, and you can deal with them as they come.

This will save you the trouble of scouring through your articles by hand trying to pick out every last apostrophe.

I just hope you were able to find this information before smart quotes were able to cause you too much trouble.

Turn Off Smart Quotes In Ms Word For Mac