Sharing AutoText Entries in a Network

AutoText is that nifty feature in Word that allows you to assign text, graphics, and other document elements to a mnemonic name, and then replace that mnemonic in your document with the expanded text at any time you want. It is a great tool to use for corporate logos, boilerplate paragraphs, standardized phrases, and the like. For this reason, many companies invest quite a bit of time in developing their own specialized AutoText entries.

This may lead you to wonder how you can share AutoText entries with everyone on your network. It would be much easier, after all, to create the AutoText entries once and then everyone access the "common repository" of entries.

Actually, it is quite easy to share AutoText entries. This is because they are one of the items stored in Word's templates. This means that if you have already developed a set of corporate templates, all you need to do is make sure that the AutoText entries are included in those templates, and then they will be available to any document that utilizes the template.

To make the corporate templates (with the AutoText entries) available to everyone on the network, simply put the templates in a shared directory on the network file server. Users can then either change their Word configuration to automatically load the template when starting, or they can attach the template to their documents, as the need arises.