Misbehaving Winword – AutoCorrect Office Prank

From Microsoft Word 97 and upwards versions Microsoft added something really useful to their add-on features. Especially for playing hidden co-worker pranks, the AutoCorrect feature lets you go wild and beyond without ever being caught as nobody could ever track you down or not even suspect human interference.

In Tools / AutoCorrect you can find a lit of words that Winword assumes to be misspelled regularly. If you are one of those folks (like me I guess) to always hit one letter earlier on your keyboard like “teh” instead of “the”: Winword would correct this typo actually as you type.

However, in order to do so you would need to tell Winword about those common mistakes. Every human being might have their own hit list of regular misspells. This is where the AutoCorrect comes in handy for a neat office prank.

If you have access to a co-workers’ computer (better even if you work in IT) mess up this AutoCorrect list. Here are a couple of ideas that work neatly and might take a while for the prank victims to realize.

Make sure to use words that really exist because in most standard configurations of Winword misspelled words are marked and thus your imposed prank changes could easily be detected. For example if you auto-corrected the word “manager” into “munnuger” Winword would underscore that word to indicate the mistake.

Instead if the word “manager” would be changed to “moron” while the typing takes place a fast typist might not realize the change as someone who is very literate in typing fast and correct tends to not read the typed message that often and that detailed. Instead they tend to scan the text block and if no red underline appears they’d assume to have spelled everything correctly.

It also helps to use similar words in start letter and approximate length. Someone who just scans the text won't detect the replacement words easily then.

Until they are called in to the bosses office of course!

Here are a couple of neat ideas to try but don’t stop there, invent your own:
Project into Prospect or Poop - Subject into Suspect or Sunbeam – Manager into Moron or Maker – CEO into CLEO ...

... or many other ideas that our readers might share in their comment.
Have fun!