Replace Dumb Quotes with Smart Quotes
The Problem:
Our reps are supposed to send me their reports as Word documents attached to email messages, but of course what most of them do is just type the reports directly in email. Some of the reports are so short, I'm sure they're at the beach (or bar, or both) on their BlackBerries. Anyway, I can copy the text from the emails into Word, but I need to smarten up the straight quotes in the emails. And boy, do they use a lot of those quotes!
The Solution:
Provided that you've got the "'Straight quotes' with 'smart quotes'" box on the AutoFormat As You Type tab of the AutoCorrect dialog box (Tools 
AutoCorrect) selected, you can change all these quotes quickly using Replace. Copy all the text into your document, choose Edit Replace (or press Ctrl+H), and run two replace operations. In the first, replace " with ". In the second, replace ' with '. Word will automatically put in the smart quotes for you.