How to Save Frequently Used Text in Word with AutoText Entries

Creating AutoText Entries
Jul 14, 2023|WAMS, Inc.|

Using AutoText makes it easy to access all those frequently repeated phrases in your Word docs. Create or edit Word documents faster.

Saving frequently repeated phrases or paragraphs to an easily accessible place is key to using text recycling to create or edit Word documents faster. One tool to make that happen: AutoText.

AuotText comes in handy with a repetitive phrase you use often. Rather than having to search for another example of it and cut and paste it, or type it all out yourself, you can program AutoText to do this for you.

Creating an AutoText Building Block

To avoid a formatting mess, the first thing I’m going to do is go to the Home tab to turn on Show/Hide so we can see the “end of paragraph” symbol (¶). This is important because you want to make sure that when you copy text into AutoText you’re not picking up the end of paragraph symbol, which a) starts a new line and b) contains paragraph formatting information that you don’t want to be embedded in the AutoText entry.

Use the left mouse button to select all this text. Remember: Back off of that “end of paragraph” marker (use Shift + left arrow) because that’s going to embed a hard return in the AutoText.

Once you’ve selected the text, go to the Insert tab, go over to Quick Parts, go down to AutoText and then click Save Selection to AutoText Gallery, which brings up the Create New Building Block dialog box.

Word will try to name this building block based on the text it sees, but you can type anything you want, as long as it’s at least four characters and it’s something distinct you can remember.

We’re going to leave this entry in the General category in our building blocks. And, because we want this AutoText to insert this into the middle of an existing paragraph, we’re going to leave this set as “Insert Content Only” as opposed to “Insert Content in Its Own Paragraph,” and then click OK to create the AutoText.

Now I’m going to delete this text on the screen to show you how this works.

When we type “sample text”, a little prompt pops up right above the letters that say “Press Enter to insert.” If we hit the Enter key, that text is inserted there automatically.

We hope you find this tip useful for inserting pieces of text that you use frequently. If you can get a set of building blocks like this you can use over and over again, you’ll find your document creation becomes a lot faster.

WAMS, Inc.

The experts at WAMS, Inc. all have a background in the legal industry and understand the software and the demands that come along with it. That’s why all our clients receive a dedicated account manager and engineer with specific planning that works for your business needs. We didn’t break into the tech world to pinch pennies from clients. We go into every partnership to help their business scale gracefully. Your company growth is our company growth, always.