Hands on: Use Smart Tags work in Word

Reader Ted Ashleigh has brought us an excellent example of Word weirdness.

A document on a colleague’s machine appeared with two dots between each word.

This wasn’t caused by double spaces, as two spaces produced four dots, and in any case these weren’t the normal space dots that you see with formatting marks made visible – instead of being centred in the line, these were slightly below it.

Fiddling with Word options made no difference, but a chance hovering of the mouse over a space revealed a Smart Tag Actions button, a small pop-up containing the letter ‘i’. Clicking on this revealed that Word was under the impression that a space was somebody’s name, and offered a number of options including sending mail.

How this had come to pass was a mystery, but suspicion falls on an Outlook or Outlook Express Address book. The solution lay in the Actions Button menu: ‘Stop Recognizing “ ” as Person Name’ sent all the mystery dots – which are in fact dashed underlines – away.

So, what are these Smart Tags and how can you use them? First, you need to be running Word 2002 (aka XP) or later, and have Smart Tags visible (Tools, Options, View). This will show tagged items with purple dashed underlines. You also need to have the tags recognised and the Action Buttons appearing – you’ll find these options under Tools, Autocorrect Options, Smart Tags.

We have seen that Word attaches Smart Tags to names. If you’ve got Outlook (rather than Outlook Express) installed, then you get a few more options such as adding a name to your contacts.

The names don’t have to be in your Outlook or Outlook Express. Anything Word thinks might be a person’s name is tagged. How it decides this is a mystery. Out of a list including Jarvis Cocker, Bill Gates, Howard Hughes, Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick, Rip Van Winkle and Tim Nott, only the Great White Whale and yours truly were honoured with Smart Tags.

PCW also gets tagged, with options that include getting a stock quote, company report or recent news. Sadly, this turns out not to refer to us but to Asian Telco PCCW. The ‘tickers’ or stock market mnemonics for companies are stored in a data file (Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Smart Tags), but again the selection seems random.

MSFT and AAPL (Microsoft and Apple) get tagged, as do some British firms, such as BAESY (BAE Systems PLC, formerly British Aerospace). British Airways merits a tag but only by its New York Stock Exchange name.

Word will also have a stab at tagging things it thinks might be places. PCW’s home, Broadwick Street, gets a tag to summon driving instructions or a map. Unfortunately, MSN Maps goes looking for this in New York. Some items that should bear a Smart Tag don’t, and some items may stop displaying their tags.

In this case, try going back to the Autocorrect Options, Smart Tags dialogue, and click the ‘Recheck Document’ button. This brings up a confirmation message involving the Grammar checker, but click the Yes button and you may or may not find that missing tags are restored.

You may think Smart Tags, while theoretically a smart idea, are not one of Microsoft’s success stories in terms of implementation, especially for those of us who don’t live in the US. In fact, Microsoft was going to implement Smart Tags in Internet Explorer under Windows XP so that any word on any web page could be turned into a link to wherever Microsoft chose. Fortunately, this piece of blatant hijacking never made it to release.

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