Your guide Carrie Marshall says… “Windows can speed up your typing with its clever suggestions, and they’re not just for touch-screen PCs. It can help with symbols and even emoji too.”
At a glance
Skill level…
Anyone can do it
Straightforward Tricky in parts
Suitable for…
Windows 10
Windows 8.1
Windows 7
If you’ve ever entered text using an Xbox One controller or on a smartphone’s small screen, you’ll know the joy of text suggestions: they’re a kind of super-powered assistance that tries to guess what you’re typing as you type it. For example if we typed “Wi” there’s a pretty good chance that the word we’re going for is ‘Windows’; with text suggestions we could type “Wi” and then select ‘Windows’ from the list.
It turns out that text suggestions are just as effective on fully-featured PCs as they are on Xboxes and touchscreen tablets. Unless you type with 100% accuracy at a million words per minute, we think you’ll find typing suggestions enormously helpful – so in this tutorial we’ll show you how to enable them, how to use them and how to use Windows’ other features to make your typing faster and more fun.
Step-by-step Tame your typing in Windows 10
1 Ask for some help
Text suggestions aren’t just for tablets and other mobile devices. You can have them for your desktop or laptop PC too. To enable them. Go into Settings > Devices > Typing and scroll down to Hardware Keyboard. You can now toggle the settings for Show Text Suggestions As I Type and Autocorrect Misspelt Words I Type on (or turn them off if they annoy you).
2 See the suggestions
We’ve brought up the on-screen keyboard here so you can see what’s happening a bit more clearly (Settings > Ease of Access > Keyboard > Use The On-Screen Keyboard). As we type, Windows tries to work out what word we’re going for and displays its suggestions in the row above the number keys. Just select the correct one.
3 Get suggestions everywhere
The typing suggestions don’t just appear when you’re editing a document in an app. They appear anywhere that you can type in text, so for example here we’re giving our untitled document a name. With a hardware keyboard, use the up, left and right arrow keys to select the suggestion you’d like to use and then tap the Space Bar or Enter key. The mouse works here too.
4 Add some fun emoji
Windows makes it easy to find the perfect emoji to cheer up your casual writing. To display the Emoji keyboard, press [Win] + [.], and the keyboard will pop up. If you keep typing, the Emoji keyboard will suggest appropriate emoji; use the arrow keys to select and [Enter] to confirm. For more on using emoji in Windows 10, see p30.
