AutoText, where are they stored?

[Andrew Staley]

I've just had a machine where Word is constantly crashing upon exit and
changes are written back against the normal.dot file. To resolve it I have
renamed the normal.dot file to normal.OLD and allowed Word to recreate the
normal.dot, which did resolve my issue.

I was under the impression though that the normal.dot file stored all the
auto-text entries and therefore on renaming it they would be lost and need
to be recreated. This dosn't seem to be the case though as they are still
present. So my question is, where are they stored?

Thanks in advance, Andrew.

 

[Beth Melton]

AutoText is stored in templates. Those that are built-in are stored in your
Normal.dot and if you recreate Normal.dot the built-in AutoText entries will
also be recreated. I wonder if what you are seeing is the built-in entries?

For user-defined AutoText entries, if you don't specify otherwise they will
also be stored in Normal.dot. If you elect to store them in another template
then they will be available only to documents that are based on the
template. However, if the template is placed in one of your Startup folders
they will be available to all documents. These are called global templates.
To see if you have any globally loaded templates, click Tools/Templates and
Add-ins.

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

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

Coauthor of Word 2007 Inside Out:
http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/9801.aspx#AboutTheBook

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