Auto Text 2000 -->2007

[aedcone]

Gosh, I am full of questions since I "upgraded" to 2007... I am sure that I
will eventually come to like the new 2007, but I am becoming greatly
impatient... and since I'm being forced into 2007 w/o any formal classes, I
am becoming completely frustrated.

The transition from Word 2000 to 2007 with change in "lingo" is xtremely
frustrating... We've finally gotten the normal template situation under
control (I think), but now we've got this issue of auto text... it's called
something else in 2007 and we've kinda figured it out... BUT, I need to
update the text in one of them and can't figure out how to do it... It's
about 3 paragraphs long and we called it "questionnaire." All I had to do
was type "quest" and hit the F3 and voile! my 3 paragraphs appeared... Like
I said, I need to revise/update this... but how is it done? I've got two
books on Word 2007 and NOTHING is mentioned about how to update...


Very frustrated

 

[Jay Freedman]

Gosh, I am full of questions since I "upgraded" to 2007... I am sure that I
will eventually come to like the new 2007, but I am becoming greatly
impatient... and since I'm being forced into 2007 w/o any formal classes, I
am becoming completely frustrated.

The transition from Word 2000 to 2007 with change in "lingo" is xtremely
frustrating... We've finally gotten the normal template situation under
control (I think), but now we've got this issue of auto text... it's called
something else in 2007 and we've kinda figured it out... BUT, I need to
update the text in one of them and can't figure out how to do it... It's
about 3 paragraphs long and we called it "questionnaire." All I had to do
was type "quest" and hit the F3 and voile! my 3 paragraphs appeared... Like
I said, I need to revise/update this... but how is it done? I've got two
books on Word 2007 and NOTHING is mentioned about how to update...


Very frustrated

AutoText is now only one of several classifications within "Building Blocks".

You never could "edit" an AutoText entry, even in previous versions. You have to
insert the entry in a document, edit the text there, and then select the text
and save it as an AutoText entry with the same name. Word will ask whether you
want to replace the existing entry, and you say yes.

So start with a new blank document, type "quest" and press F3. Make whatever
changes are needed. Select the entire revised entry and press Alt+F3. In the
dialog that appears, enter "questionnaire" for the name, and select AutoText for
the Gallery. When you click OK, you'll be asked "Do you want to redefine the
building block entry?" Click the Yes button, and the job is done.

To manage these and the other building blocks, go to the Insert ribbon, click
the Quick Parts button in the Text group, and choose Building Blocks Organizer.
Initially the items are sorted by name, but you can click any of the column
heads to sort by that column; click Gallery to get all the AutoText entries to
come to the top. Select any entry and click the Edit Properties button to move
it to a different gallery or to a different template (only those that are
currently loaded are available), to change the way it's inserted, or to add a
description.

You can also add an AutoText button to the Quick Access Toolbar: Right-click the
toolbar, choose Customize, set the category to All Commands, select AutoText
from the list, and click the Add button.

 

[aedcone]

Thanks for the info...

AutoText is now only one of several classifications within "Building Blocks".

You never could "edit" an AutoText entry, even in previous versions. You have to
insert the entry in a document, edit the text there, and then select the text
and save it as an AutoText entry with the same name. Word will ask whether you
want to replace the existing entry, and you say yes.

So start with a new blank document, type "quest" and press F3. Make whatever
changes are needed. Select the entire revised entry and press Alt+F3. In the
dialog that appears, enter "questionnaire" for the name, and select AutoText for
the Gallery. When you click OK, you'll be asked "Do you want to redefine the
building block entry?" Click the Yes button, and the job is done.

To manage these and the other building blocks, go to the Insert ribbon, click
the Quick Parts button in the Text group, and choose Building Blocks Organizer.
Initially the items are sorted by name, but you can click any of the column
heads to sort by that column; click Gallery to get all the AutoText entries to
come to the top. Select any entry and click the Edit Properties button to move
it to a different gallery or to a different template (only those that are
currently loaded are available), to change the way it's inserted, or to add a
description.

You can also add an AutoText button to the Quick Access Toolbar: Right-click the
toolbar, choose Customize, set the category to All Commands, select AutoText
from the list, and click the Add button.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit.

 

[aedcone]

Like I said Jay, Thanks for the info...

I have (at least I thought I did) redefined the autotext in Word, following
your instructions, but it's still inserting the OLD stuff... What might I be
doing wrong? Also, even the old autotext isn't working in Outlook 2007....
this is extremely frustrating...

 

[Jay Freedman]

Open the Building Blocks Organizer, as I described before, and look at the
entries that aren't behaving properly. Where does it say they're stored (in the
Templates column of the organizer)? Usually they're in either Normal.dotm or
Building Blocks.dotx.

If they're in Normal.dotm, are you having trouble with other things being saved
in that template? Try clicking the Edit Properties button and changing the Save
In box to save an entry in Building Blocks.dotx, and then modify it -- does that
help?

By the way, you should be able to find Normal.dotx in the folder
%appdata%\Microsoft\Templates, and Building Blocks.dotx in
%appdata%\Microsoft\Document Building Blocks\1033 (or possibly another numbered
folder, depending on the default language of your installation).

 

[aedcone]

Well, what I decided to do was to copy the text into a dummy email and save
it in Outlook 2007... where it saved it in the email template file... seems
to be double work... but it worked... I'll have to look further into your
suggestion... I tried to save it to the .dotm and .dotx and .dot there are
so many different copies of the "normal" templates with different file
extensions, that its very confusing... I even tried to save it to the email
template... thinking oh, this is kool (whiles I was in Word)... but that
didn't work... so I copied it, like I mentioned above, into a dummy email and
then save it with the name I had used in Word... and it DID save it in the
email .dot??? whatever the file extension was where I could have saved it
from Word... this again, is frustrating... seems double the work...

 

[Jay Freedman]

It _is_ double the work, and there's no way around that. Here's the background:

In Office 2003 and earlier, you could choose to use Word as the email editor for
Outlook. That caused all sorts of problems, a long list of sad stories. For
Office 2007, Microsoft changed that: they took the parts of Word that are useful
for Outlook and put them into a completely separate file. The Outlook editor now
looks like Word but is _not_ Word itself.

A side effect of this change is that there are two completely separate
templates, Normal.dotm for Word and NormalEmail.dotm for Outlook. Saving
anything, such as a style or an AutoText entry, into one of them does _not_ make
it available in the other one. You do have to save them separately in both
programs. I suspect you might be able to make a copy of Normal.dotm and name it
NormalEmail.dotm, but I haven't tried that.

About the extensions: ".dotm" is a Word-2007-only template that is enabled for
saving macros (thus the "m"). ".dotx" is a Word-2007-only template that is
_not_ enabled for saving macros. For the "normal" template, only the .dotm
extension is useful. Finally, ".dot" is a template from Word 2003 or earlier.
Word 2007 can use it, but it isn't encouraged.

 

[aedcone]

Again, thanks Jay for ALL of this info...

Now onto my next two problems... well, they're not problems yet, but I am
sure climbing Mt Everest would be less frustrating... Macros and dealing
with mail mergers... I had no problems in 2000, 2007 might be something
different... especially when I've got document forms and data sources that
were created in 2000 and now I'll to figure out to use them w/o having to
re-create them in 2007.

You'll probably be reading more posts from me... again thanks....

 

[Jay Freedman]

For mail merges, this may help:
http://www.gmayor.com/merge_labels_with_word_2007.htm (and not just for labels,
either).