How to Stop Word from Changing Your Quotes and Dashes

You type a straight quote or two hyphens and Word swaps in a curly quote or a long dash the moment you press the space bar. The AutoFormat As You Type feature inside AutoCorrect is making the replacement, and it is on by default. Two checkboxes turn it off, and Find and Replace cleans up text that has already been changed.

Open the AutoCorrect settings

On Windows, go to File, Options, Proofing, AutoCorrect Options. On Mac, go to Word, Preferences, AutoCorrect (the menu item is named Settings in newer versions).

Untick the two boxes on AutoFormat As You Type

Open the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Under Replace as you type, clear these two boxes:

• "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes"
• Hyphens (--) with dash

Click OK. From now on a typed " stays straight and two hyphens stay two hyphens. The second box also controls the swap of a spaced single hyphen for an en dash, so clearing it stops both.

Clear the same boxes on the AutoFormat tab

The AutoFormat tab in the same dialog has the same two checkboxes. These apply when AutoFormat is run on existing text rather than while typing, and some templates and macros trigger it. Clear them too so the substitutions do not come back through a different door.

Undo a single swap as it happens

Right after Word changes a character, press Ctrl + Z (Mac: Cmd + Z) once. The swap is reversed and the straight character stays. Keep typing; Word does not retry that instance.

Fix a document that already has curly quotes

With the smart quotes box turned off, press Ctrl + H (Mac: Shift + Cmd + H). Type " in both Find what and Replace with, then click Replace All. Word treats a straight quote in the Find box as matching both curly and straight forms, and writes the straight one. Repeat with ' for apostrophes. For dashes, copy an em dash out of the document, paste it into Find what, type two hyphens in Replace with, and click Replace All.

This matters most when the document holds code, URLs, file paths, or commands. A shell or compiler does not recognize curly quotes as quotes, and an em dash inside a path or command-line flag fails without an obvious error.

If you use Google Docs or Pages. Google Docs has the same settings under Tools, Preferences: untick Use smart quotes, and open the Substitutions tab to remove the two-hyphen rule. In Pages, go to Edit, Substitutions and uncheck Smart Quotes and Smart Dashes.