Danger of Auto Formatting Text
Microsoft Word and other word processing platforms auto format punctuation. Oddly, punctuation that has been formatted through these word processing platforms is not converted in the same way as the programs running search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, etc. For instance, word processing programs will turn:
- straight apostrophes, commas, and quotation marks are turned into curved versions
- fractions written as 1/2 become ½
- a short hyphen – is turned into a longer hyphen –
- ordinals such as 1st are turned into 1st
The solution to fix this issue is to strip all of the auto formatting from the context prior to copying and publishing it on your website. To do this in Microsoft Word, one simply clicks on Tools and selects the AutoCorrect Options. Then, click on the Autoformat tab and uncheck the boxes besides:
- “Straight quotes” with “smart quotes”
- Ordinals (1st) with superscript
- Fraction 1/2 with fraction characters ½
- Hyphen – with dash –