autotextlist not working as expected

[JustSomeGuy]

For a letter, I want to present three possible addressee first names in an
autotext list that appears in the letter template with the literal text,
"Addressee", the three possibile first names formatted with a special style
named 'ATAddressee", and the tip text stating, "Select Addressee".

The syntax I've written is as follows:
{AUTOTEXTLIST "Addressee" \s "ATAddressee" \t\"Select Addressee: }

I used Ctrl-F9 to generate the curly brackets.

When I hover over the resulting literal text, the desired screen tip text
appears, but when I right-click on the field, I get a dropdown list of all my
autotext entries EXCEPT FOR the Addresse entries I wanted to appear., even
though none of the unwanted autotext entries in the dropdown have been
assigned the style, "ATAddressee".

Supposedly, I should only be seeing those three addressees, because they are
the only ones formatted with the style I specified in the AutotextList
syntax.

What am I doing wrong?

 

[Ed]

Hi JSG,

{AUTOTEXTLIST "Addressee" \s "ATAddressee" \t\"Select Addressee: }

has a couple of typos; I imagine you mean

{AUTOTEXTLIST "Addressee" \s "ATAddressee" \t "Select Addressee:" }

I'm using Word 2003 and I got the same effect as you when I right-clicked
the field before I had actually created the autotext entries, so one
possibility is that the autotext entries are in a template that is not
available to the document you're using.

Regards.

Ed

 

[Ed]

Oops!

Should have mentioned that as soon as I had created the autotext entries the
field worked as intended.

Cheers.

Ed

 

[JustSomeGuy]

Thanks, Ed - several hours of working with autotext lists got me pretty good
at spotting things like missing double quotes and other typos. Stil not sure
why the wrong items were appearing in my autotext list, but I found that when
it sometimes happens I have to re-do an entire autotextlist from scratch,
including re-defining the unique style used for it.

 

[Ed]

Hi JSG,

I don't know if this is relevant to your situation, but the following seems
to be true (for me) ...

I can save autotext entries into normal.dot, a template which is in my Word
startup folder, a template I have loaded through Tools>Templates and Addins,
or a template I've opened (e.g. by means of File>Open).

If I try to create autotext entries in a template which is just the attached
template of the document I have open, then, when I close the document, if I
opt not to save the changes to the document, Word seems not to save the
changes (autotext) to the attached template and the autotext entries are
lost. If I opt to save the changes to the document, Word prompts me to save
the changes to the attached template and (if I opt to save them) the autotext
entries are retained.

Regards.

Ed

 

[Bob W]

There's definitely some Twilight Zone things that can happen to
autotextlists. In my experience, although they offer great promise for
simplifying work, they often tend to get mysteriously corrupted over time,
even when carefully stored in a template (other than Normal.dot) attached to
a document. Sometimes one or more unintended autotext items mysteriously
start appearing in the autotext dropdown, even though they were never defined
in that autotext list! Sometimes one, or all, of my autotext fields,
suddenly start showing me ALL my autotext items, not just the ones I defined
in an Autotext List. In one case, after working properly for many weeks, I
suddenly notice that when I clicked on the field for Autotextlist A, the
autotext list items that I had defined for Autotext List B were appearing
instead of the the items I had so tediously defined for Autotext List A! For
these reasons, I've very regrettably begun moving away from autotext lists -
they take a lot of time to set up, and when they get mysteriously corrupted,
fixing them takes at least as long again. I am pretty sure they don't save
much time, overall, because of the hassles involved with creating and
maintaining them. At one time I thought they were going to be very helpful
to our workgroup and rolled out some templates to help the team work faster,
with some autotext list items in them. They worked for a while, and then
problems like I've described, above, started happening. Autotextlists exist
and reside kind of in the background, and lack convenient dialogs that might
otherwise make them easy to create and manage. To me, although they appear
to be a great novelty feature and a source of interesting discussions among
Word MVPs in theory, putting these kinds of features into serious, reliable
practice has been disappointing, at least for me, despite the enormous
patience and time I've expended on them. Other users may disagree, but I have
reluctantly come to feel that they are not robust enough - or, maybe, at
least in my case, idiot-proof enough - for Prime Time usage.