How to change Straight Quotes to Smart Quotes in Office apps

How to change Straight Quotes to Smart Quotes in Office apps

You can hate archaic or old fashioned straight quotes. These quotes lack curves. On the other hand, there are more stylized and curved smart quotes which are preferred by most of the users. So if you want change the right quotes to a smart or apostrophe in a Office application like Word, PowerPoint or Excel, read on

Change direct quotes to smart quotes in Word

If you don’t know, the straight quotes or the apostrophe are the two generic vertical quotes located near the “Enter” key on your PC keyboard: the single straight quote (“) and the double straight quote (“).

To replace direct quotes with smart quotes in the Office Word application, you need to follow these steps:

  1. Open the Office Word application
  2. Automatic correction options access box
  3. Access automatic formatting when typing

There is an alternative to this. You can work around this problem by using a Find / ReplaceFunction e. However, if you are an author and publisher, proofing documents over 400 pages can be very tedious and time consuming.

1]Open an Office application

Launch a Microsoft Office application such as Word, PowerPoint or Excel. For convenience, I have used Microsoft Word as an example in this article.

2]Automatic correction options access box

Once open, choose the ‘File“In the upper left corner of the Word screen and choose”The options(Located at the bottom of the list).

Then in the ‘Word Options“Who appears, click on”proofingThe “tab.

3]Go to the “Automatic formatting while typing” tab

Then under the Autocorrect section, click on ‘AutoCorrect optionsThe “tab.

Now go to ‘Automatic formatting when typing“And search”Replace‘section.

Check the box next to “Simple quotes” with “smart quotes”.

Similarly, to deactivate the option, simply uncheck the box.

Click on OK.

Press the “OK” button again in the Word Options area to save all changes.

This way you can replace simple quotes with smart quotes in any Office application.

Read more: How to use the Microsoft Word image editing tools.

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