auto text, why won't it work or only works sporadically ...

Anonymous
2010-10-24T20:58:44+00:00

moved from word 2000 to word 2010 and now auto text which was copied over works only occasionally and randomly ... i have done the word 2010 tutorial ... googled ad nauseum about it and i can not figure it out ... in word 2000 i added the auto text and when typing a document if i started typing the words of the auto text a greyish box showed up with the entire text, i hit enter and kept typing ... it is hit or miss whether the box will show up ... i have tried adding new auto text and that does not work at all ... what am i doing wrong ???

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  1. Anonymous
    2012-01-03T18:59:21+00:00

    I agree.  It works intermittently, no rhyme or reason.  It does not appear that Microsoft is interested in fixing what many of us consider an important function of their product.  It has been mentioned by mo coworkers that we seem to have gone backwards from Office 2003 to 2010 in functionality.

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  2. Stefan Blom 352.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2011-12-26T15:55:03+00:00

    Thank you for the testing/clarification/extra work over Christmas. :-)

    I haven't had the time to test this yet, but I vaguely recall a problem in the past with numeric characters in Building Block names.

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  3. Anonymous
    2011-12-26T06:48:53+00:00

    Hmmm ...Yesterday I was working on the need to update my web page http://www.gmayor.com/AutotextList.htm I hadn't bothered for Word 2007, but as Word 2010 has the prompts I thought it might warrant another look.

    The original entries h1 and h2 I felt were too short to be useful, so I created instead a pair of entries called heading1 and heading2.

    Because of the number of matching characters you would expect the popup to occur when the 1 or 2 was completed, but the autocorrect activates when you type the 1 or the 2 to capitalise the word at the start of a sentence. This appears to inhibit the pop up. Thus when I type heading1 at the start of a new line the popup does not occur, but if I immediately type heading1 again it does.

    This behaviour seems to be consistent, which gave rise to my sugegstion that the autocorrect was the issue. However when I retested this morning, with a key with no numeric characters, the autotext pop up worked normally, despite the autocorrection, which I guess is what you are seeing.

    Thus it would appear that with this choice of keywords the autocorrect occurs before the key word is completed and the length of the keywords with respect to the number character may have been the issue, with two actions vying for precedence at the same character and it is that conflict rather than the autocorrect per-se that is the cause of the failure to fire the pop up?.

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  4. Stefan Blom 352.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2011-12-25T23:13:58+00:00

    Well, based on the (admittedly simple) testing I've done so far, I don't see it...

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  5. Charles Kenyon 170.9K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2011-12-25T18:09:10+00:00

    AutoText does work in Word 2010 although it is slightly different from Word 2003 (or Word 2002).

    If you want the tooltip to show, the AutoText must be stored in normal.dotm. The tooltip is needed for you to be able to press Enter to insert the AT.

    Otherwise, you need to press the F3 key to insert your entry. So long as you have typed at least three characters and it is enough to uniquely identify your AT Entry.

    I'm used to the tooltip as well and have not generally stored anything I want to keep in normal. It is one of the pains of the changes to Word. I'll live with it.

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