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

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?.

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.

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.

Following Graham's test results, did you make sure that your AutoText / Building Block names do not contain numeric characters?

Neither capitalization nor numeric characters were ever a hindrance to the auto-text function in pre-2007 MS Word versions. Please do not dismiss the importance of this function by conjuring random factors that allegedly prevent it from working properly.

The fact of the matter is that there was NEVER an issue with auto-text functionality in pre-2007 MS Word versions, so why should there be one now? It is a glitch & it needs to be fixed, without question.

I have experienced this glitch often & consequently have tested various solutions to no avail. Many of which were proposed in this message thread. I have also tested the glitch to determine any form of a pattern. Bottom line, there isn’t one.

I thought it may perhaps be due to an older .doc version or because I was typing within a table. NOPE! I’ve tested the same auto-text entry in several .docs which were open simultaneously. The same auto-text entry completed in some forms & not others as well as within some tables & not others. I’ve even experienced this failure with titles of months, WHICH ARE PROGRAMMED INTO THE SOFTWARE BY DEFAULT! Obviously, that debunks the folder theory.

This is a problem that isn’t going to go away simply by ensuring that you save your auto-text entries into a specific folder or exclude capital letters or numbers. It was dubbed auto-text for a reason; because it is supposed to be automatic. No hoops, no standing on one foot, no particulars. Just set it & forget it. PLEASE FIX THIS FOR THE SAKE OF EVERY CLERICAL PERSON’S EFFICIENCY!