Disappearing AutoText Entries

Recently subscriber Chuck Swett complained that it appeared his AutoText entries were disappearing in Word 2000, and he wondered why this was happening. Different subscribers provided different possible answers. For instance, Chuck could be working on a network which didn't allow the Normal.dot file to be saved, or perhaps Chuck was saving AutoText entries is a different template that wasn't always available.

However, Chuck gave one telling piece of the puzzle when he indicated that he frequently switches back and forth between Spanish and English in his documents. According to other subscribers, this problem is only encountered when switching from one language to another. It appears that Word 2000 maintains separate AutoText and AutoCorrect entries for different languages; when you switch from one language to the other, only those entries for that language are available. Whether this is a bug or not is open to debate, but it is tangentially addressed in Knowledge Base article Q220247, where Microsoft indicates that AutoComplete tips--based on AutoText--do not appear when switching from one language to another. Only time will tell how Microsoft will address this issue in future releases.