How to Turn Off Text Suggestions While Typing

Suggestions are appearing and switching one setting off did not stop them. That is because there is no single setting: Windows, Word, Outlook, your webmail and your browser each have their own, they run independently, and turning off any one of them leaves the other four alone.

Work out which layer is producing yours by where the suggestion appears, then use the matching switch below.

Windows

Settings → Time & language → Typing. Turn off Show text suggestions when typing on the physical keyboard. If you type in more than one language, turn off Multilingual text suggestions as well — it is a separate toggle and it keeps working when the first one is off.

Word

File → Options → Advanced, scroll to Show text predictions while typing and clear it. There is a shortcut: if the status bar at the bottom of the window shows Text Predictions: ON, clicking that text opens the same setting.

Outlook

• Classic Outlook. File → Options → Mail, under Compose messages: Show text predictions while typing.
• New Outlook and Outlook on the web. Settings → Mail → Smart suggestions, and under Text predictions clear Suggest words or phrases as I type.

If Word or Outlook predictions are already off and suggestions still appear, check the other layers, starting with Windows and then the service open in your browser.

Gmail

Settings (the gear) → See all settings → General → Smart Compose → Writing suggestions off. The related Smart Compose personalization setting is separate and controls whether Gmail adapts suggestions to your writing.

Excel is a different thing with a similar name

Excel’s AutoComplete fills a cell from other values in the same column. File → Options → Advanced → Enable AutoComplete for cell values. It is unrelated to text prediction and has to be turned off separately, which is why people who switched everything else off still find Excel finishing their entries.

The browser is also a different thing

What a browser fills into a form field is saved autofill data, and what it offers in the address bar is search-engine suggestions. Neither is text prediction. Both are in the browser’s own settings under autofill, privacy or search, and neither is affected by anything above.

If the problem is the design, not the idea

Prediction, autocorrect and field handling are separate behaviours:

• Something changed what you typed. That is autocorrect, not prediction. The difference between the two is the difference between being offered a word and having one substituted.
• The suggestion accepted itself on a key you were already using. Space and Enter are used for other things a hundred times a minute, and a tool that takes them will insert text you did not want.
• It appeared in a sensitive field. A password box, a banking form, a licence key.

Typeahead is built around those three. It never changes what you typed — the suggestion sits next to the caret as grey text and inserts only when you press Tab, and the accept key can be changed if Tab is doing something else in your work. Keep typing and the suggestion disappears without a trace. It can be turned off for individual applications, so it can exist in your mail client and not in your terminal. Password fields are ignored, and password manager and finance applications are protected by default, with no setting that turns that off.

Suggestions come from a compact model running on your own PC, so nothing you type is sent anywhere and it works with no connection. The mail-client suggestions above use cloud services instead.

If you simply want silence while you write, the switches at the top of this page are the answer and nothing here improves on them.

Sources

• Microsoft: Enable text suggestions in Windows
• Microsoft: Use text predictions in Outlook
• Google: Use Smart Compose in Gmail

Frequently asked questions