Shortcuts and alerts can help increase your productivity and also reduce the risk that you will end up with false ‘corrections’ in the body of your text when using Global AutoCorrect. Todays tutorial will demonstrate how to create and customise both alerts and shortcuts in GAC.

Creating Shortcuts

A shortcut can be helpful for anyone who regularly has to write a certain phrase, sentence or even paragraph. For example, as a header or footer on an email or paperwork you regularly have to fill out. To create a shortcut, press F2 (or fn+F2) with no words selected. This box will come up:

First, choose an abbreviation/ acronym that you will remember for the shortcut. I wrote ‘tfrr’ as a shortcut to ‘Thanks for reading, Rachel’ which I use to sign off my blog posts and type out pretty often. Type this abbreviation/ acronym into the ‘Incorrect’ box, and what you would like it to correct to in the ‘Correct’ box. You can also write entire paragraphs into this box, or copy them in from a separate document. This is particularly helpful if you often have to copy and paste a paragraph for example a disclaimer on an email or a study you’re working on. One police officer used this to sign their emails off with the necessary legal jargon at the end of every important email they sent, instead of copy and pasting every time.

Press ‘OK’ and your shortcut is created. Now every time I try to type tfrr it autocorrects to ‘Thanks for reading, Rachel’. This may also be helpful in essays when referring to specialist terminology or key phrases that it takes a while to type each time.  To remove or to edit the shortcut, right click on the GAC icon on your task bar, select ‘Open Global AutoCorrect’ and then search the shortcut in your corrections as shown below…

once you have selected the relevant shortcut, choose from the options below to edit or delete it. Conveniently enough, this is the place to start to add an alert too!

Adding Alerts

Adding alerts is a convenient way to teach yourself to spell better and also a handy way to make sure there are no incorrect words ending up in the body of your text. This can be particularly helpful for people with an SpLD, visual impairment or fatigue that prevents you easily watching the autocorrect function working as you type. In this circumstance you might miss if the software mistakenly corrects a word to something you didn’t intend it to, so setting up alerts helps you avoid this.

From the step above, select the word that you know you often have issues with. As an example I will set alerts for the shortcut we’ve created above- ‘tfrr’. When ‘tfrr’ is selected, I click on alert and an exclamation mark pops up to the left of it, as below…

The next time I type ‘tfrr’ the following alert pops up in the middle of my screen with the word that GAC has corrected to:

This gives me time to read and confirm that this was correct. If it wasn’t, I can select the word and F2/ Fn+F2 or go through the main GAC page (Ctrl+Shift+G) to amend it by searching for (in the top left corner) and selecting the word in the list of corrections then clicking edit.

The settings for this alert can be customised: you can choose to have, for example, a beep, or a visual display or both. You can alter the colour of the text and background of the visual alert and the duration it is displayed for, especially useful if it will take you a while to read it. You can customise these settings as below, by opening GAC (Ctrl+Shift+G) and then pressing ‘Options’…

Quick user guides and interactive tutorials for Global AutoCorrect on Mac and PC can be found on Lexable’s frequently asked questions page.

For convenience, I have hyperlinked a tutorial on how to customise and add dictionaries in Global AutoCorrect and a basic tutorial on adding, removing and customising autocorrections which I have written on this blog.

You can access a free trial of Global AutoCorrect from the Lexable website, or you can contact your disability advisor at the DDSS or DSA needs assessor to find out if you are eligible for funding. You can also purchase Global AutoCorrect.

Thanks for reading,

Rachel