Stop fighting with Microsoft Word! You know who you are. You wrangle with Word, undoing the automatic corrections it makes, cussing at its formatting changes, and painstakingly counting spaces and measuring inches so you can get margins, indentations, spacing, and the like to conform to APA. You can quit now, because I'm going to show you a better way. Relax.

Repeat after me: Word is my friend. Word can help me and save me time. The trick is to learn the ways of Word and figure out what you need to change and what you need to accept. It's like the Serenity Prayer: accept the things you cannot change, change the things you can, and be wise enough to know the difference.

Let's tackle those red and green squiggly lines that keep appearing underneath your brilliant prose. DO NOT IGNORE those colorful lines! They are trying to tell you something significant. A red line under a word means that the word does not exist in that form in the Microsoft Word dictionary. In other words, it might be misspelled. Notice I said might. Since nurses and nursing students usually write papers that contain medical language, many of the words we commonly use are not in the Microsoft Word dictionary. Also, many names, like those of authors you might be referencing, are not in the dictionary.

Here's how to handle a red squiggly line. Right-click on the underlined word. A menu will appear that gives you several options. Probably Word will suggest a word that it thinks you might have meant--if you typed the word "gynoplasty," for example, Word might suggest "cytoplast." If you typed the word "totol," Word might guess that you meant to type "total." 

If you misspelled the word, and Word correctly guesses the word you meant to type, select that word and left-click on it. The right word will magically appear in place of the misspelled word. Wonderful.

However, if you know for sure that you did NOT misspell the word, then you should choose the option in the menu that says "Add to Dictionary." This will make the red squiggly line disappear, and Word won't bother you about this word in the future. It will know that when you type "gynoplasty," that's what you mean. There's nothing worse than software that nags you incessantly about something that you know is correct, so this will effectively stop the nagging. Over time you will build up a nice little customized dictionary in Word that contains lots of medical terminology that Word recognizes. Just be sure you are filling this dictionary full of correctly spelled words!! You are setting yourself up for problems if you add misspelled words to the Word dictionary.

Sometimes Word doesn't recognize a word, and it also doesn't have any suggestions to make. You'll have to figure out for yourself if the word is misspelled or if it is correctly spelled and you want to add it to the dictionary. If you're not sure, select "Look up" in the menu. A Research Pane will come up in the Task Pane, with the word in question and the results of a search through Microsoft's reference books. Pretty nifty.

You can also choose to "Ignore All," which means Word will overlook this particular word, thereby causing the red squiggly lines to disappear. You can select "AutoCorrect," which means Word will fix the word for you--the AutoCorrect features are a whole 'nother blog unto themselves. If you have somehow wandered into using the wrong language in Word, you'll get lots of red squiggly lines under words that you know are correct--check to be sure you are using English by choosing "Language" in the right-click menu.

Enough for now. We'll tackle the green squiggly lines later.