Smileys in Outlook, how to prevent it

Question

When I type the emoticon ":)" in Outlook 2007, it turns into a smiley face, as in a face inside of a circle...Is there a way for me to prevent Outlook from doing that? I just want a plain old colon and parentheses... Thanks!

Other than putting a space in between please...

Answer 1

For Outlook 2007:

• Tools menu
• Options menu
• Spelling tab
• Spelling and AutoCorrection button
• AutoCorrect Options button
• AutoCorrect tab (default)
• Now you can either deselect the Replace Text As You Type option or you can leave it active and just remove the offending smilies from the list of replacements.

Answer 2

If your concern is that when these smilies turn into "J" on a plain text device, like a Blackberry, there's another option besides disabling it entirely, which is changing it to replace with the Unicode smiley character, 0x263A: ☺

A "quick" way to do this is to open the "Insert symbol" dialog in Outlook, type 263A into the Character code box (bottom right), then click the AutoCorrect... button in the bottom left to create a new autocorrect rule for your preferred smiley to the text-safe Unicode equivalent.

Here's a Lifehacker link with more detail & more difficult approach to get to the autocorrect entry.