Can You Conver Autotext from Office 03 to Office 07

[Tim Horton]

The company I am employed by just updated all office pc's to Office 2007. I
am a biologist who over the years has been creating autotext entries for
hundreds of scientific names for plant and animal species. I am aware that
the entire autotext data is a template (normal.dot). In the past I have lost
all my autotext data due to hard drive re-imaging but was able to save the
normal.dot file and reload it after the re-imaging was complete. Is there a
way for me to retreive my autotext entries from Office 2003? I've tried to
load the normal. dot file in the word options/add-ins/word add ins path but
was not successful. The entries still do not appear in the building blocks
window. Please help.
Tim Horton

 

[Jay Freedman]

First (outside of Word) make a copy of the old Normal.dot and rename it to
something like Autotext.dot. Store the original Normal.dot somewhere else for
safekeeping and remove it from the Templates folder.

Open the Autotext.dot in Word 2007. Open the macro editor and remove all
macros from it (any you want to keep should be moved to the Normal.dotm
template created by Word 2007's installation). After closing the macro
editor, click the Office button and choose Convert, then save as
Autotext.dotx. (That changes the file format to the new XML-based format.)
Close Word.

Move Autotext.dotx from its current location to the folder

%appdata%\Microsoft\Document Building Blocks

When you restart Word, you'll find your autotext entries in the Building
Blocks organizer.