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Microsoft Word's AutoText feature is a great time saver. But most people never get beyond those simple chunks of text that Word installs for you. To really get the most out of AutoText, you should save your own text into AutoText. In fact, in this article, I'm going to tell you how you can create an entire library of your own text.
The Basics
AutoText is great if you need to build your own documents from stock text. You just highlight individual paragraphs you use often, press Alt + F3, give your text a name and click OK. From then on, whenever you need that text on your page, just type the name right into the document and press the F3 key. The text you saved under that AutoText name is inserted at the cursor position, in place of the name.
You can use AutoText for more than just simple text. You can format a paragraph a particular way and save it as an AutoText entry. All the formatting stays with the text. So if you have complex formatting that you need to apply to a particular part of a document, save a sample. You can then insert your copy and make the changes to any words as necessary and leave the complex formatting intact.
It's even better if you have something like a table that you like formatted a certain way. Rather than having to dig up that old document that contained the table in order to copy and paste the table into your new document, select the table and save it to AutoText. Then whenever you need it, just retrieve it onto your page.
Revising AutoText
To revise an AutoText entry, you literally have to resave a new version over the old one. If you need to do this, retrieve the current AutoText entry. Make the necessary changes and then select the information again, hit Alt + F3 and give it the same name as you did before.
Traveling AutoText
By default, all AutoText is saved into the Normal.dot template. So if you use Alt+F3 to save AutoText, it is inserted into your default Normal.dot template. However, sometimes you may need to save AutoText into a different specific template. That way, when you send that template to someone else to use, the AutoText travels with the document.
To add your AutoText entries to a specific template, you can do it one of two ways: using the AutoText dialog box or by copying them in from the Normal template. To insert the AutoText directly into your custom template by using the AutoText Dialog Box, highlight your text and then choose Insert|AutoText|AutoText. Give it a name and then select the specific template from the drop down list in that dialog, as shown below.
If you like the shortcut approach better, you can save all your entries quickly with the Alt + F3 shortcut and then copy them all over to the custom template using the Organizer. This is a good way to do it if you want to keep a copy of all the entries available to you at all times within the default (Normal.dot) template.
You can use the Organizer by choosing Tools|Templates and Add Ins|Organizer as shown below. (Or if you don't have that option in your version of Word, choose Tools|Macro|Macro and you'll find a button for it there too.)
With the Organizer, you can share Styles, AutoText, Toolbars and Macros. If the template you need to use is not the Normal.dot, which will show up as the default if no other template is currently being used, you can click Close File and open whatever source file you need.
AutoText Organization
Have you ever wondered how those AutoText entries are organized? It doesn't seem like there is any rhyme or reason to it. Actually, they're organized by styles!
Some Microsoftie figured that you'd be using specific Closing, Heading, Attention Line styles for every different type of AutoText. So that's how they fall into different categories when you look at the AutoText list.
Click Insert | AutoText. Notice that AutoText has a gray bar across the menu. It's a snap off toolbar. So grab it and drag it onto your screen so you can work with it a bit.
Notice all the items under the Closing category.
Now you can add something to that list.
Open a blank document. Type Get lost, loser . Highlight the text you just typed. Hold down Shift and click the Style Window (on the Formatting Toolbar) to see all of the available styles in Normal.dot. Locate the Closing style and apply it to the text you have highlighted.
With the newly styled text still highlighted, hit Alt + F3 and give it the AutoText name Loser. When you look at your Closing entries in your AutoText toolbar, you'll now see that you can tell someone what you really think of him!
To remove this entry, click the main AutoText Dialog button (the icon to the left, looking like a finger on a keyboard) or click Tools | AutoCorrect | AutoText, or you can even use the Organizer, if it's handy. Highlight the entry you no longer need and click Delete.
Virtual Styles
If you wanted to organize your own list of really useful AutoText entries, as opposed to the ones you see in the image above, you can dump all those entries and/or create your own. You just need to format them so they each use the same style.
Suppose you wanted to create a list of paragraphs that go into a special contract called Agreement. Create a style named Agreement. (If you don't want any special formatting applied, just copy the Normal style and rename a new version of it to Agreement.)
Add sample paragraphs to a blank document. Hit Ctrl+A to select all of them. Now click in the Style Window, which should say Normal. Type Agreement over Normal (you can't delete the Normal style, so this process creates a new style based on Normal) and hit Enter to add this new style. Now this new style is applied to all the paragraphs. Highlight each paragraph, in turn, press Alt + F3 and each one a name. When you're finished adding several, look at your AutoText list. You now see a new category called Agreement and your new entries are listed. A quick click on one and you enter that info into the current cursor location of your file. Pretty cool, huh?
If you want to keep your Normal.dot from becoming too bloated with a lot of unnecessary styles added just to create these AutoText categories, delete the bogus styles you used. Yes, you can delete the Agreement style and the entries stay put. The association remains, as if the style were still there. The only problem with deleting the bogus styles is that, if you want to add more AutoText entries into the Agreement category, you'd have to recreate the Agreement style. But if you follow the process you just used, you can see that won't be a big deal because it was easy to create.
AutoTextList Field
And if you thought that was cool, it gets even cooler! I'm going to show you how to create a type of form letter using the AutoTextList Field.
Open a blank page. Using the entries you added earlier, you're going to pretend they're all closing paragraphs for a document (so you don't have to worry about sorting them). You then add a special field to the document that lets you easily select any of the closings with a click.
Using Word's Forms Toolbar*, you can create a letter or a document that has fields you can fill in to build a document. Add a little VBA programming and you can automate the form. But what if you already have the text entered into your AutoText and you just want to easily pull specific paragraphs into various locations to build a document with text you already have?
You can use this cool AutoTextList field. You can click Insert | Field | AutoTextList and build the field code through the input box and options in that dialog box. But you're going to build the field from scratch, so follow along.
Hit Ctrl +F9 to enter special field brackets. These are not the keyboard brackets! These are special field brackets and must be inserted using the Ctrl +F9 keystroke. At the cursor location, type the following, exactly as follows:
{ AUTOTEXTLIST "Right click here" \s "Agreement" \* MERGEFORMAT }
When you're finished typing and while your cursor is still within the bounds of the field, hit F9.
Move your mouse over the text and right click. The list of Agreement AutoText entries will appear.
Select one of the entries and your prompt text is replaced with your choice. The field continues to be a field, even though your Right click here text has been replaced. You can continue to right click the field and select a different entry. If you have your Fields set to Highlight (click Tools | Options | View to set this), you'll still see the text as a highlighted field.
Decode
Okay, so what just happened? Here's a description of what each part of the field means. The original field code you typed is on top and the decoded argument list is below it.
{ AUTOTEXTLIST "Right click here..." \s "Agreement" \* MERGEFORMAT }
FIELDNAME "Text to appear" \s (style switch) "StyleCategoryName" \* KEEPFORMATTING
If you wanted, or needed, you could create a bunch of specific styles, enter all your special paragraphs on a page, and style them with the same style to categorize them. Then add them with understandable names to AutoText. After you have the AutoText set up, add an AutoTextList field in all the locations of a master template where the person using the form needs to make a choice to compile a special document. Make sure you have all the AutoText entries properly added to whatever master template you'll use so they travel with the file.
To add a bunch of fields, you can just copy the same field to each location, press Shift + F9 to access the field and just change the name of the style list. Once you have it all set up, the person using the document can just zip along, right clicking and choosing their text. Bingo! Instant document!
Have fun using AutoText. But more importantly, use it to save time!
*Editor's note: for more on Word Auto Forms, refer to the following articles:
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