Change Straight Quotation Marks to Curly Ones

If you are editing a file that contains "straight," old-fashioned quotation marks and apostrophes as found on a typewriter, you can turn them into typographically correct "curly" marks by using this option, which will also activate Word's Autoformat option of turning straight quotation marks to curly ones as you type.

This option also turns single quotation marks at the beginning of certain words into apostrophes. These words are ’til, ’tis, ’tisn’t, ’twas, ’twasn’t, ’twould, ’twouldn’t, and ’em. The same is true of single quotation marks in front of numbers, such as ’99. Except for these exceptions, this option will turn apostrophes at the beginning of words into single quotation marks, which is almost always what they should be.

There is also a macro that does precisely the opposite of this option, turning curly marks into straight ones and turning off the Autoformat option. Its name is FixCurlyQuotationMarks. You can run it under Tools, Macros, and you'll find it especially useful if you are creating Help files.