Anyone who has used Word for any amount of time will know that it can ‘try to help’. This is a very clever semi-intelligence that Microsoft have built into the software, but we all know it as those annoying little things that happen as we work. What you probably didn’t know, is that you can stop most of them from happening.
The most annoying thing we hear about is the way Word starts numbering text for no apparent reason. Actually, there is a very good explanation here. You open a blank document, type a number one, then a line of text or paragraph and hit the return key. Word is actually watching what you are doing, sees the number at the beginning of the text and assumes you are setting up a numbered list.
When you hit the return key, Word converts the text to a numbered list on your behalf!
This sort of action is found in many different ways, and is organised or activated through settings in the Autotext settings. [previous to Word 2007 and called Autocorrect in higher versions.]
PowerPoint doesn’t have so many of these things, at least not ones that you can change settings for. Tables, for instance, are odd to say the least, although things have improved greatly since 2007. You would think they would work the same way as they do in Word, but they don’t. This is probably because Microsoft didn’t originally develop PowerPoint, and probably haven’t unified the applications in Office as much as they should do.