Most of us who have used Microsoft Word would also know about it’s AutoCorrect feature. Normally we use it to replace certain long text with a shorter form to reduce key strokes. For example you can set the AutoCorrect to replace ‘yf’ with ‘Yours faithfully’. This is how most of us use it.

But few people are aware that the AutoCorrect text can include images too. For instance, you can set up an AutoCorrect entry so that whenever you type ‘logo‘ it is replaced by your company’s actual logo graphic. This makes it easy to insert any image that you use frequently.

The best example would be to use a scanned version of your signature to ’sign’ any document that you would like to distribute via email or fax.

You would first need to scan your signature and save it as a graphic file. Make sure that there isn’t too much white space around the signature. If the scanned signature has lot of white space you can use any photo editor to crop the signature alone. Once you have scanned, cropped and saved your signature as an image, you can proceed with the following steps:

• In Word, select Insert > Picture and browse to the folder where you saved your signature image and select it. Click Insert.
• Once the image is inserted into the Word page, select the signature.
• In Word 2007, select Office > Word Options, click Proofing, and then click AutoCorrect Options to display the AutoCorrect dialog box.
• Select the AutoCorrect tab if it is not already selected.
• In the Replace text box, type an abbreviation or code for the signature, say ‘sig‘. Ensure that the ‘Formatted Text‘ option is selected.
• Click Add.
• Click Ok and then click Ok again in the Word Options dialog box.

Now whenever you want to insert your signature, just type ‘sig‘ and press Enter. Instead of Enter you could also press spacebar or tab.

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