How to Replace MS Word Smart Quotes With Straight Quotes with a MS Word Macro

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(Globally) change any smart quotes (“xxxx” or yyy’s), usually used in MS Word, to straight quotes (“xxxx“ and or yyy’s). Those smart quotes are often not rendered correctly by some platforms. If MS Word keeps recreating them then go to File > Options > Proofing and uncheck the AutoCorrect option. Replace-MS-Word-Smart-Quotes-With-Straight-Quotes

Video Transcription

This is Andre Klein,

I’m going to shoot a quick video about how we can get rid of these nice fancy smart quotes, as Google named them or some other programs to.

Basically you can see they’re upside down, this one is the opening, and this one is the closing quotes and its similar here. The problem is, like these kind of quotes, if we want to publish them in our website or maybe, an article directory or whatever, they tend to show up like this. So on our website they won’t display correctly?

So what I’ve did is I created a macro, a Word macro, but basically what it does, it replaces all these quotes. So you have here the special opening quotes, and they will be replaced by a normal quotes, that’s the way it basically done. And I like to associate them to a hotkey. So in order for you to just to be able to copy this, and put it into one of your macros, I’ll show you how to do this.

But first of all, what you need to do is to create a macro yourself if you don’t have one. So we go to View macro, and let’s say, just record the macro and we give it a name, we call it Replace,… ReplaceQ and we can even, so what I’d like to do, is like I said, I’d like to assign it to a hot key. So I go here and just say CTRL+ SHIFT+H and you say assign and Close.

So now our macros is running, the only thing we want to do really is we just want to have a macro where we can copy and paste into. That would probably go in here and just do a find, that’s maybe,… and then I would stop my macro, go here and drop the recording.

So if I go now to our Macro viewer, before we go over there, I will copy this part of the quote and there it is, everything just in between the EndSub below and the SubThese are comments, so you could really copy them if you want to, but for the sake of this exercise, I am just going in here, View Macros and there is my replaceq, I say, EDIT. This will open up the editor, so as you can see its empty, basically you can do anything, that’s no problem, you just copy our code here. So we already have it and if you want to place here the hotkeys so you remember it. Hotkey CTRL plus SHIFT plus H, and we go up here and say save.

Now we can close down the window and let’s go back to the Word document we had before. So if I will run these macro again, view > macros >view macros and I say run, I could do with CTRL SHIFT H, that’s for the example,… and nothing happens! So what’s gone wrong here?

Basically what happens is that, in options>proofing>auto-correct option> there is a setting here which says here “straight quotes with smart quotes”, we have to uncheck this, and say ok, so then Word will never replace your normal quotes that you’re entering in as smart quotes, ok? Close this down. So if I now run macros again, I did it now with the hotkey, you see all these fancy smart quotes have been replaced. So now you can take your text and copy it very nicely in to your website and you won’t have reformat problem.

I copied this text of the macro below this video so you can copy directly from there.

Copy the light blue highlighted code with any EXISTING MS Word macro
Sub ReplaceQuotes()
‘ ReplaceQuotes Macro
‘ Shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+Q
‘
    Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
    With Selection.Find
        .Text = ChrW(8220)
        .Replacement.Text = “”””
        .Forward = True
        .Wrap = wdFindContinue
        .Format = False
        .MatchCase = False
        .MatchWholeWord = False
        .MatchWildcards = False
        .MatchSoundsLike = False
        .MatchAllWordForms = False
    End With
    Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
    Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
    With Selection.Find
        .Text = ChrW(8221)
        .Replacement.Text = “”””
    End With
    Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
    Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
    With Selection.Find
        .Text = “´”
        .Replacement.Text = “‘”
        .Forward = True
        .Wrap = wdFindContinue
        .Format = False
        .MatchCase = False
        .MatchWholeWord = False
        .MatchWildcards = False
        .MatchSoundsLike = False
        .MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
    Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
    Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
    With Selection.Find
        .Text = “‘”
        .Replacement.Text = “‘”
        .Forward = True
        .Wrap = wdFindContinue
        .Format = False
        .MatchCase = False
        .MatchWholeWord = False
        .MatchWildcards = False
        .MatchSoundsLike = False
        .MatchAllWordForms = False
    End With
    Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
    Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
    With Selection.Find
        .Text = “’”
        .Replacement.Text = “‘”
        .Forward = True
        .Wrap = wdFindContinue
        .Format = False
        .MatchCase = False
        .MatchWholeWord = False
        .MatchWildcards = False
        .MatchSoundsLike = False
        .MatchAllWordForms = False
    End With
    Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub