Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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As you probably know, Word 2003 and older versions had features called AutoCorrect and AutoText – these were stored blocks of reusable text that could be invoked from another block of seldom used text — "ppp" for example, or from the AutoText menu.

The question is, can you migrate these to Office 2007 easily?

The answer, if you go for the italicized word (easily) is No.

Microsoft's answer is on TechNet in its migration area at link.

The key to the problem is that AutoText and AutoCorrect are no longer available in Word 2007; they have been replaced by Building Blocks.

To recap, to create one of these gems in Word 2003 you first select the text.

Figure 1:

You can save an AutoCorrect entry with a set of letters in the AutoCorrect dialog box.

Figure 2:

You can add them to the AutoText menu in the AutoText tab of the same dialog box. And then you can add them from the AutoText toolbar from the Normal option (Normal being the main template).

Figure 3:

What I tried to do was to take a Word 2003 Normal.dot file with my AutoText entry and follow the migration instructions to put it from my laptop to my desktop, where I had loaded Word 2007.

Figure 4:

Then I tried to follow the migration instructions in the link above, which would presumably turn my AutoText entry into a Building Block in Word 2007.

The biggest hurdle I encountered along the way, and which does not seem to be addressed in the migration instructions, by the way, was that I had not upgraded on the same machine.

I was attempting to move a Normal.dot file from one computer to another, with Vista, on which I had loaded Word 2007 from scratch.

The migration contemplated by the instructions is one where Word 2003 is upgraded to Word 2007 on a Windows XP machine. (The file folders and directories referenced in the instructions are for an XP system — Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data, etc. — which does not exist on Vista.

I tried doing something similar on Vista and it did not work. Even when I opened the template file which I had renamed to the dotx extension manually, the Quick Parts (or Building Blocks) were still based on the Normal11 template that Word 2007 had created.

Maybe I was doing something wrong, but the interesting thing was that if I opened the Normal.dot file in Word 2007, my AutoText entries (default) were there — but not the one I created.

Figure 5:

That's too bad, because otherwise I could have used the Building Blocks Organizer to move an entry to the main Word 2007 Building Blocks template.

But unlike the Styles Organizer in earlier versions where you could move entries from one document or template to another, there is no such facility here — and it's a moot point anyway because my AutoText entry was not there to move anywhere.

This brings up other issues — what about other customizations that you create in earlier versions of Office programs – like toolbars, macros and menus — are they easily migrated to Office 2007, if at all?

Office 2007 does have a Quick Access Toolbar to customize its 2007 features, but I have not seen any way migrate older macros and other customization features. In fact MVPs Steve Rindsberg and Austin Myers who have created Add-Ins for 2003 have had varying degrees of success in migrating them.

As an aside, if you are looking for a migration tool for older versions, you might try Freeware Phrase Express which I have not actually used but which purports to move both AutoText and AutoCorrect entries between Office 2003 and earlier installations.

What I have not even mentioned (yet) is the issue of using different versions of Word and Outlook on the same computer.

This brings up the issue of yet another template for the WordMail editor in Outlook.

I tried to keep my Outlook at 2003 and move to Word 2007 on my laptop so that I could demonstrate the later version of Word and PowerPoint but not upgrade Outlook in order to avoid problems I had encountered when I upgraded my desktop Outlook 2003 to 2007.

On that occasion it simply stopped sending email altogether after a month, and I could neither uninstall nor reinstall either version of Outlook.

I encountered the same problem on my laptop when I tried to keep Outlook 2003 and not upgrade to the entire Office 2007 suite. I tried to avoid Word as my email editor (since Outlook 2003 could not recognize Word 2007), but eventually my email stopped sending entirely, the Windows installer kept trying to load something, and when I attempted to upgrade to Outlook 2007, it showed the app as "unavailable" in my installation window.

A search on Google found lots of similar experiences and one user said that by uninstalling Outlook 2003 he had worked it out. I found it impossible uninstall Outlook 2003 or install Outlook 2007.

The bottom line is to read the migration pages in the link above carefully and plan your move with lots of backups.

Further, I recommend that if you go to Office 2007 do not attempt to keep your Office 2003 programs or any combination thereof; instead go for a clean install of Office 2007.

While the apps seem to work on Windows XP my own experience is that they seem more stable on Vista.

And be prepared for some pain in terms of reinventing or reinstalling (as opposed to migrating) your customized features from one version to the next.

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