Hands on: Autotext unmasked

Find out how you can tame one of Word’s most useful tools

One of the fundamental features of any word processor is the facility to insert often used or ‘boilerplate’ text.

I could do this in 1985 on my first business computer – an Amstrad PCW (no relation). Word calls this feature Autotext and, although it’s a very handy feature, its implementation and obfuscated interface leave a lot to be desired.

If you go to Insert, Autotext, Autotext… in any version of Word from 97 to 2003, you’ll see a list of predefined words and phrases you can drop into your document by double-clicking on them. Most of these make you wonder why you bothered. Is it really slower for even the least gifted typist to type ‘Subject:’ than it is to go to Insert, Autotext, Autotext… and scroll down the list?

In fact, it’s a little cleverer than that if you have the ‘Show AutoComplete suggestions’ box ticked. If you type the first few letters of a word or phrase that is an Autotext entry, you should get a screen tip pop-up with the whole word or phrase – pressing Enter will complete it. This doesn’t always seem to happen, but usually you can achieve the same end without the screen tip by typing the first few letters followed by F3.

You may still want to prune the entries, however, unless you spend so much time writing to ‘Dear Sir or Madam’ that pressing F3 after the first two words is going to save you a heap of effort. You can get rid of any entries by selecting them and pressing the Delete button. Don’t be too ruthless just yet as there are one or two valuable nuggets among all the ‘Dear Sir’ and ‘Cordially’ dross.

Where it all gets much more interesting is in creating your own Autotext entries. Select a block of text, then go to Insert, Autotext, Autotext… and you’ll see the selected text in the Preview pane and the first few words in the ‘Enter Autotext entries here’ box. Overtype the latter with a mnemonic shortcut – for instance ‘me’ for your name and address – then click the Add button. This will add the entry to the Normal.dot template, or you can specify a different template from the ‘Look in:’ box. So, whenever you are creating a document using that template, typing ‘me’ followed by F3 will produce your name and address.

Once you’ve got the hang of this you’ll probably find it more convenient to use the Autotext Toolbar. You can create entries by selecting text and hitting the New button – you’ll be prompted for a name for the new entry. This is the same as the ‘Enter Autotext entries here’ box – the name you choose, followed by F3 will insert the entry, so keep it short and memorable.

Unlike the dialogue box, the toolbar groups Autotext entries, as does the rest of the Autotext sub-menu. All the ‘Dear Sir’ stuff is under Salutations, the ‘Respectfully yours’ under Closings, and so on.

Entries you’ve created yourself will be listed – for reasons I can’t quite fathom – under the style in which they were created. However, you can manipulate this feature to create your own toolbar sub-menu. First, create a new style with the name you want for the sub-menu. Using this style, create the individual Autotext entries you want listed under it. There’s a little problem here as once you are ‘in’ that style, you’ll only see the style’s Autotext entries in the toolbar. You’ve also got a style that you don’t really need. So delete the style and make sure you save the template changes when you close Word. Restart Word and you’ll find that even though the style is gone, its menu entry in the Autotext toolbar survives.

Despite the name, Autotext isn’t limited to text. You can include graphics, text boxes, fields, equations and more. Inserting fields as Autotext can save a lot of time - some, such as page numbers and the filename of the current document are already set up. You can, of course, add your own from all the Word fields available, which saves a lot of digging through dialogues if you use certain fields frequently.

As well as putting fields into Autotext, you can do the reverse. For example, you can use Autotext to insert as yet unknown text. Imagine you are writing press releases for a company launching a new soft drink.

The only problem is the marketing department is split on the name and slogan. Should it be ‘Tasteetang! The fizz that’s full of feelgood factor’ or ‘Limelight! The soft drink for sophisticates’? Whichever wins, you are going to be using it a lot, so you want to spare yourself the pain of having to type it by storing it as an Autotext entry.

So here’s what you do. Define the Autotext entry as anything you like - say ‘The drink that can’t make up its mind’, and give it an Autotext name of ‘drink’. Now instead of entering the Autotext entry in the normal way, go to Insert, Field, and select Autotext in the left pane, and the ‘drink’ entry in the right. You’ll see the text appear, but it’s a field, not normal text. So when marketing finally makes up its mind, you can delete the ‘drink’ Autotext entry and recreate it with the new text, but the old name. Bingo – all the fields will update to the new slogan.

Things are much the same - if a little better presented - in Open Office. Note that here the feature is under the Edit, not the Insert menu. One big advantage over Word is that you can edit Autotext entries - and their shortcuts - from the dialogue box. Finally, in Word 2007, Autotext has been subsumed under the new ‘Building Blocks’ feature, and we’ll be taking a look at that next month.

Polish your prose
Most of us are fairly tooled-up concerning writing aids. Irrespective of which word processor you use, you should have a spelling checker, with one or more user dictionaries to store proper names and other words not found in the standard dictionary and, if you’re really keen, an exclusion dictionary - which is useful for flagging words that are similar, such as prey and pray, or words that though correctly spelled, are not what you intended.

Whitesmoke Text Enrichment is a piece of software that, in the words of its publishers, ‘amends grammar, spelling and punctuation, and enriches the user’s text by suggesting alternative and/or additional wording’. It does this in any text-editing situation if you press F2, and it has some special interaction with Word.

Whitesmoke can be a bit of a battle, doing strange things such as changing the style of a checked paragraph to the style of the following paragraph.

It is also extremely imaginative. Who would have thought that the text in screen 6 could have been enhanced by adding ‘windy’ before ‘stage’?

It’s also constantly phoning home and offering me special deals in adverts in the Whitesmoke window and I get a steady stream of spam from the company. It insists on loading Startup, even though my trial has now expired and I’ve ticked the box not to load. It certainly takes the award for blatant oversell, but I’m going to miss its loopy suggestions.

Quick tips
Here’s a tip from our regular correspondent Jean Elliott. As you probably know, Control & Spacebar removes all direct character formatting from the selection, reverting to the style of the containing paragraph. What I didn’t know is that Control & Q removes all direct paragraph formatting from the current or selected paragraph(s). As Jean points out, this can be handy if you have a paragraph that’s indented and you want the next one to revert to style.

One good point of the Word XP and 2003 Styles Task Pane is that you can select a style and highlight all instances of the style in the document: it’s useful for checking formatting consistency when similar styles are used.

If you’ve ever looked up from the keyboard and found that you’ve been typing with the cAPS LOCK KEY on then you can undo the damage by selecting the text and pressing Shift & F3 repeatedly - the text will cycle between all capitals, all lower-case and initial capitals.