Microsoft Excel is equipped with a robust AutoCorrect engine designed to fix common typos on the fly. One of its most famous automatic corrections involves the copyright symbol. If you type an open parenthesis, the letter c, and a close parenthesis—like this: (c)—Excel will instantly delete those three characters and replace them with a singular copyright symbol: ©.
While this is a clever shortcut if you frequently draft legal documents, it is incredibly annoying if you are simply creating an alphabetical list (e.g., item a, item b, item c) or typing a serial code that happens to include a lowercase ‘c’ in parentheses. Instead of constantly pressing Ctrl+Z to undo the formatting, you can tell Excel to permanently stop replacing those characters.
How to Turn Off the Copyright AutoCorrect
You can remove this specific text replacement rule directly from the Excel Options menu.
- Open Microsoft Excel.
- Click on File in the top-left corner of the ribbon.
- Click Options at the very bottom of the left sidebar.
- In the Excel Options window, select Proofing from the left-hand navigation pane.
- Click the AutoCorrect Options… button near the top of the window.
- Ensure you are on the AutoCorrect tab.
- In the middle of the window, you will see a scrollable list of replacement rules. Scroll down until you find the rule that replaces (c) with ©.
- Click on that specific row so it is highlighted in blue.
- Click the Delete button at the bottom of the list.
- Click OK twice to close both option windows.
What About Other Annoying Symbols?
While you are in the AutoCorrect menu, you might want to look at the other default replacements. You can use the exact same process described above to stop Excel from automatically converting (r) into the Registered Trademark symbol (®), or (tm) into the Trademark symbol (™).