How to use Autotext in Word | Sarah's Office Snippets

Autotext is a facility in Word and Outlook which enables you to save regularly used pieces of text into your computer's memory. You can then insert them easily whenever you need to use them again. No more copy/pasting!

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Video Transcription:

Hi it's Sarah and I'm back with another Office Snippet for you today.

Do you ever have standard paragraphs of text that you use in either a Word document or email and do you find yourself perhaps hunting for them and doing a copy paste or perhaps resending an email or whatever it might be? Well, did you know that there is something called Autotext and it's a facility that exists in Word and in Outlook. It basically answers the question of how to store those standard pieces of text so that you don't have to keep copying and pasting them.

To add a piece of auto text is really simple. You can use the buttons on the ribbon but it's a bit more complicated so today I'm just going to show you the process and keyboard shortcut for it.

So let's say that I would like all of this to be added as a piece of auto text in Word. First highlight your text. There's no limit by the way. It could be a page. It could be a sentence. It could be just a paragraph. Once it's highlighted you press alt and the F3 key. So I hold down alt which doesn't do anything and then I just do a press of the F3 button which is the function key at the top of your keyboard. You then just need to give it a name. Something that makes sense to you and this is the name that you will need to type whenever you want to insert it. It needs to be more than six characters ideally. So, in this case, I'm just going to call it testsarah for example. I prefer not to use any spaces but you can if you want to. If you're going to make a lot of these I would suggest that you keep a list so you remember the names by the way so that’s my top tip. Once you've done that just press the ok button and that has now added it.

So let's say I'm doing another document. I want to insert my auto text so all I need to do is type test and you can see after just four characters it's now coming up with that text and saying press ENTER to insert. Now if you happen to just be typing the word test just carry on typing and ignore it but if you want to insert that piece of auto text all I have to do is press ENTER. There you go! Simple as that.

This is one of my favourites again. It can save so much time and it's the exact same principle to do it in Outlook as it is to do it in Word. So just to remind you, highlight your text then hold down alt F3, give it a name and press ok.

I really hope that you find this one useful like I do. Do let me know how you get on with it. I really like your feedback. Social media can be so anonymous can't it so it'd be lovely to hear from you if you enjoy this one. Thanks for listening. See you soon.