Organise Autotext

[Guest]

Hi,

I am setting up a template for work with autotext entries included.

However i would like to organise the autotext entries, in one menu i.e. from
the autotext menu click "all entries" then click "Standard Paragraphs" then
select the appropriate auto text.

Is this possible, and if so how would I need to go about arranging this.

Thanks


Marc

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

AutoText is organized according to the style applied to the entries. See
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/TblsFldsFms/AutoTextList.htm for an explanation.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

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all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

Susanne,
Seems to me there is a way to organize the autotext menu hierarchically...I
seem to recall some years ago I had an autotext menu set up so that when I'd
choose Insert Autotext I'd get a pulldown menu showing major categories of
autotexts and then by selecting a category I'd get a second sub-menu
containing just those autotexts. I don't recall how I did it, but it was
very useful...you could hold the mouse button down and navigate through the
hierarchy to find any sub-autotext item. Could this also be done for
autotextlists? Or am I mixing up one recollection with something else?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

What you are remembering is the default AutoText menu. Each submenu
represents a particular style. I don't believe you could do this with an
AutoTextList because it has to be all one style.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

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all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

Yep, you are probably right...and M'soft doesn't let us modify the default
autotext menu, as far as I can tell - too bad. It would be a nice feature to
be able to stuff a lot more content into the autotext menus via hierarchical
submenus.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

To clarify: you can get these submenus by defining new styles and creating
AutoText entries in those styles. You just can't get submenus in an
AutoTextList field.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

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all may benefit.

 

[JustSomeGuy]

Suzanne, I read the MVP article but still don't grasp how you would control
what appears in the autotext menu scheme below... ie, by using styles, how
would you control what a 'level one' item would be (i.e. "Region")? How you
would get "Region 1 Managers" to be a first sub-choice under "Region"? And
how would you make the actual region manager names in each region, appear
under Region 1, Region 2, etc?

Region

Region 1 Managers
Joe Smith
Pete Jones
Region 2 Managers
Suzanne Barnhill
Barney Fyfe

....etc.

 

[Jay Freedman]

The AutoText menu isn't that flexible. You can only get one level of
organization, strictly by the style names. So if the styles are named Region 1
Managers, Region 2 Managers, etc. then you can get

Region 1 Managers

Joe Smith
Pete Jones Region 2 Managers
Suzanne Barnhill
Barney Fyfe

but you can't put a Region heading over the whole mess.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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may benefit.

 

[JustSomeGuy]

Jay, it's hard to believe someone in the world hasn't figured out some kind
of Word add-in or utility that would give users the ability to EASILY set up
a multi level hierarchical menu set with links to chunks of information
embedded at various levels so that a writer could cruise effortlessly through
the menu tree (akin to cruising javascript rollover menus on a web page) and
wherever he/she released the mouse button, the information 'chunk' stored in
that menu location would drop into the word document at the cursor location.
The utility could store those 'chunks' in individual word.docs, all formatted
and styled, ready for extraction/pasting by the menu utility. It's such an
intuitive no-brainer of an idea, and it could make multiple-choice selection
of data a breeze! But if it's out there somewhere, I haven't found it yet,
despite many hours of googling....

AutoText is OK but it's so greatly limited in its utility....a great idea
that for some reason maybe got back-burnered by the Word development staff.

Seems to me such a WYSIWYG utility would be extremely popular with much of
Earth's Word user community, don't you think?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You can create a menu item with any name you like (Region, for example) and
then have a submenu for the AutoText entries. The limitation would be that
if a style that had no AutoText entries was in use, your AutoText menu would
show all entries, and if you were using a given Region style, you'd see only
the entries for that style, so there wouldn't be much point in the extra
mouse click to get to them.

 

[Graham Mayor]

See http://gregmaxey.mvps.org/Populate_UserForm_ListBox.htm

--
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>

 

[JustSomeGuy]

Suzanne, many thanks for the ideas; Graham, thanks for that link - and
profound thanks to Greg and Doug for their genius! I just sent Greg a
PayPal donation for the UserForm ListBox schema. Brilliant!