Automatic species name formatting?

[Guest]

I biology, species names should be italicised and written in full on their
first mention (for example, Arabidopsis thaliana) and abbreviated in all
subsequent mentions (for example, A. thaliana). Is there a way of making this
formatting automatic (including the abbreviation of the name after its first
mention)? Thanks.

 

[Summer]

Yes, use Autocorrect, but you will have to be very specific with your
abbreviations.

 

[Guest]

I'm a little new to Autotext. Could you be more specific about what you mean
by " be very specific with your abbreviations"?

 

[Graham Mayor]

Autocorrect not autotext. By specific Summer meant that if you are not
careful with your trigger letters you could get the autocorrect operating
when you don't require it. eg for A. thaliana you could use #at rather than
at.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

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[Guest]

Apologies for the confusion between autotext and autocorrect. I see how I
could add separate entries for the full name and the abbreviation. However, I
was interested in whether I could type a single entry that would generate the
full name first and the abbreviated name on subsequent occassions.

Thanks.

 

[Graham Mayor]

Unfortunately Word still doesn't offer the ability to extract part of a
field in a cross reference, so no.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Guest]

So there's no way of, say, playing with the IF field to generate one thing on
it's first mention and another on subsequent occassions?

 

[Graham Mayor]

You would have to insert the fields at each location. it would be far
quicker to use autocorrect/autotext.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Guest]

But if it was possible to make a field that would generate the correct form
of the species name, couldn't you then add that field as autotext? I'm sorry
to keep going on about this, but I'm interested in how it works now!

Thanks

 

[Graham Mayor]

The principles are covered at http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/Repeating_Data.htm

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

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[Guest]

I'm really sorry for sounding so utterly stupid, but I still don't quite
understand. Do you mean I could insert a form field for the species name and
reference it elsewhere in the document? This still only gives one form of the
species name.

 

[Graham Mayor]

Yes you could, but it would be more trouble than it is worth eg

Arabidopsis thaliana

was the example you quoted, and

A. thaliana.

was what you wanted to use as reference, so if you entered Arabidopsis
thaliana in a form field bookmarked (say) Text1 you could use a reference
{IF {Text1} = "Arabidopsis thaliana" "A. thaliana"}
You would then have to repeat that conditional field for each one of your
possible terms. It simply isn't practical unless you are working with only a
handful of terms, which seems very unlikely in the field of Biology!

Word does not have any intelligence to work out the version you really wish
to insert automatically and I cannot think of any method that you could use
in Word that would be faster than having a set of alternative autocorrect or
autotext entries. If I was doing this I would use autocorrect. I would setup
something like
#arth for Arabidopsis thaliana
%arth for A. thaliana

I don't know if it would help you, but I use an application called
GhostTyper as an aid to storing standard texts. This works very much like
the best of autocorrect and autotext, but has the advantage that you can
setup more than one entry on the same 'trigger'. This you could use the same
trigger for all entries of the same genus. Then #arth could pop up a list of
likely candidates for you to select from. It also works in any application
with keyboard input.
http://www.sc-data.de/ghosttyper/en/index.php3?nav=Produkt You would have to
pre-program it, so how much time it would save you would depend on how much
of this work you are likely to do to justify the time and expense.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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