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. 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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  2. Anonymous
    2011-12-25T13:55:56+00:00

    It is not the case per-se, but the fact that it changes, which appears to interrupt the action. Try it and see what you think.

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  3. Stefan Blom 352.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2011-12-25T13:24:41+00:00

    Are you sure? In my experience, AutoComplete is not case-sensitive.

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  4. Anonymous
    2011-12-25T10:04:24+00:00

    I suspect the issue with autotedxt failing to work may have something to do with auto-capitalisation. If the keyword starts a sentence and Word has the option set to autocapitalise the start of a sentence then that capitalisation interferes with the keyword and it then doesn't appear to be recognised as a keyword for autotext. Try the same keyword in the middle of a sentence and see if it works then.

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  5. Charles Kenyon 170.9K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2011-12-24T19:38:38+00:00

       

    Note that it (the tooltip) also works if the AutoText (Building Block) is saved in the template attached to the active document, no matter if that attached template is Normal or some other template.

    Thank you for the correction.

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