Word should check conformance to rules for acronyms.

[Guest]

In many kinds of documents, acronyms must be defined at first occurrence and
listed in an acronym list. After being defined, the acronym should be used
in place of the phrase it abbreviates. No acronym should be used to replace
a phrase that occurs only once in the document.

Checking for conformance to these three rules is a tedious manual process.

I suggest that Word should provide help in checking for conformance and
creating the acronym list.

 

[Beth Melton]

I suspect this is a Suggestion for Microsoft posted on the web
interface for the newsgroups on the Microsoft website.

I'm not sure what you are suggesting, actually. Are you saying you
would like to see some type of a reverse AutoCorrect feature?

IOW, if you create an AutoCorrect entry for an acronym you would like
to see Word search the document for the "Replace With" text and
replace it with the acronym?

--
Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

 

[Guest]

I have been straining my brain for days to try and figure this out myself.
That is how I happened upon your post.
This is what I have learned so far:
Using a wildcard search with the "Highlight all items found in" box checked
will return acronyms as follows:
<([A-Z]@[A-Z])> (Finds all acronyms.)
[(][A-Z]@[)] (Finds all acronyms in parentheses.)
<[A-Z]* (Insert space at the end. Finds all words in title case)

Even though it seems that one should be able to use a wildcard search to
find both the acronym and the phrase it abbreviates, I cannot accomplish
this. The word search always returns an error. I tried to find 1-5
instances of words in title case, followed by an acronym, but no combination
of valid wildcard terms accomplished this. Word got confused each and every
time.
You can do a search, then open a new doc, paste in the results, then run a
simple macro to form a table. However, you are still stuck going back and
finding the phrases manually.
If you (or anyone else reading this) can take what I have done as a
foundation and actually solve the "automating the acronym table" problem, I
would be eternally grateful to hear from you.
Thanks!
Christy
(e-mail address removed)