Although software like Microsoft Office come with spell check and auto-correct feature, but it is not available in rest of the text editors like Notepad and Wordpad. Using the free Word Expander software you can add auto-correction feature to all the applications of Microsoft Windows. It is basically a word expander program for medical transcription work, but it can also be used to auto-correct misspelled words. Word Expander works on a system level below individual applications and therefore works universally in all the applications.
You can download Word Expander from the Word Expander website. The download is a setup program using which you can install it on your system. The application is written using Microsoft .NET 4, so you need to install .NET framework redistributable before you can run it. After the installation, Word Expander launches automatically and places an icon in the notification area of Windows. You can right-click on this icon and toggle detection on or off from the context menu.
Word Expander does not come with any libraries of for auto-correction or phrases. But you can download them from the Word Expander website. The phrase libraries are for expansion of acronyms into full phrases and the auto-correct library is for automatically correcting misspelled words. To add the downloaded libraries to Word Expander, open the Word Expander window (by clicking on its notification area icon). Then switch to the Libraries tab in the ribbon bar. If you have downloaded a phrase library, click on Phrase Library icon in the ribbon bar. If you have downloaded an auto-correct library, click on AutoCorrect Library icon in the ribbon bar. Then click on the Import Library button and select the downloaded library file.
Now after adding the libraries, you are ready to use it. Just open any text editor application like Notepad, your internet browser or OpenOffice Writer etc. If you type a misspelled word it is automatically corrected using the database from the auto-correct library. If you begin to type a medical term, it is automatically completed or expanded using the lists from the medical phrase libraries.
Word Expander is a great productive application for Windows. It can add auto-correct and acronym expansion features to almost every application in Windows like Microsoft Office, OpenOffice Writer, Notepad, Wordpad, Skype, Firefox, Internet Explorer etc. It also supports unicode, so it can work easily with the words from all the languages like Chinese or Japanese.
You can download Word Expander from http://www.wordexpander.net/.