Auto-Correction Preferences In Pages, Numbers and Keynote

A new feature in Pages, Numbers and Keynote is the Preferences screen for Auto-Correct settings. You can customize things like automatic smart quotes and spell correction on a per-app basis. You can also add to a list of automatic text replacements and ignored spelling words for each app.

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Video Transcript: With the new versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote that came out last week there's a new feature found inside of Preferences. So if I go here to Pages, Preferences you can see, in addition to General and Rules, there's now Auto-Correction. This shows some options here for some things that may look familiar because we've had these in different places before and we've had some of this stuff system wide. 
But now we have settings that are specific to these apps and they only work for each app. So you can have a different set of settings here for Pages and another set for Numbers for instance. So anything you set here is just for Pages and works across all Pages documents. So you open a new one or edit an old one and these settings will stay. 
So what we've got here are things of whether or not spelling will be checked automatically. Formatting. Things like smart quotes. You know when you type quotes on your keyboard whether they're, you know, curling to the left or curling to the right, and how they are. You can turn these on or off specifically for Pages in this case. 
Also Text Replacement. We have this system wide but here's a set that's only for Pages, for instance. So I can add one here. I'm probably going to be typing the phrase Mac OS High Sierra a lot. So I can say MHS converts to Mac OS High Sierra. Now when I type, I can type  MHS and you see as soon as I hit the spacebar return it does the substitution for me. This doesn't add it to System Preferences where it would work everywhere. But it only adds it inside of Pages. 
Now you may remember there were other ways to get to these. In the past you were able to see these if you went to Edit and then you went to things like say Substitutions. There's smart quotes and smart dashes. So I could actually change these here. If I turn off smart quotes you could see it gives me a dash here because in this control area smart quotes and dashes are in the same place. But in here they're separate. So if I turn off smart dashes you can see it turns it off completely there. If I were to go to say Links and I turn that off, you can see that it turns it off here.  So you do have the ability to control it in both places still but this is just a place where you can go to it. 
You also have Ignored Words.  So you can go in here and see words that are to be ignored by the Spellchecker. So I could just simply, you know let's just type a bunch of random characters, and you can see it spellchecks that. I could Control click on it and say ignore spelling and now if I go into Preferences, Auto-Correction, Ignored Word, you can see it's listed there. I can select it and delete it. 
So there's definitely some idiosyncrasies here. You know, notice in Spelling and Grammar here, Check Spelling while Typing and Correct Grammar with Spelling, Correct Spelling Automatically, doesn't quite match up to these here so it can get confusing at times. Which one's turned on.
Also under Substitutions you've got this Substitution panel here which kind of conflicts with some of the stuff you see up there as well. So, you know, you can decide where you want to set things and just keep in mind that it doesn't always match up with some of these menus. 
But in general it works pretty well and it's nice to have this all here. It's really nice to have these settings, especially text replacement, specific to Pages where people do a lot of writing and may want to have replacements that don't actually apply anywhere else on their Mac.

Auto-Correction Preferences In Pages, Numbers and Keynote

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