Simulating Autocomplete in MS Office 2007

I upgraded from Microsoft Office 2003 to 2007 at my office today and the first thing I noticed was that the autocomplete function is missing from Word 2007. This is rather annoying because there are certain phrases (like the name of my company and other organizations that we often work with) that I had stored in my old version of Office so that I didn’t have to type them out every time I needed them. Autocomplete is a real time saver, and not something that I want to give up. I spent a while poking around the internet trying to find a way to replace this very important function, and finally came up with a good solution.

This hint will help you if, for example, you want to find a quick way to type a something like “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” without having to type the whole thing out every time.

1. Type out the complete text that you want Office to give you. In this case, we would type:

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

2. Use your mouse or keyboard to select the text.

3. In the “Insert” ribbon, go to the “Text” group and choose “Quick Parts”. Click on the very last option: “Save Selection in Quick Parts Gallery”.

4. A dialogue box will open up. In the first section type some sort of abbreviated version of the complete text. For this example, we will type “UNFCCC”. In the third box, choose a category (or create a new one), and then click OK.

Now, in your document, type “UNFCCC” and then press the F3 button. If everything has been set up correctly, you should see “UNFCCC” magically change into “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change”. In fact, if there isn’t anything other than UNFCCC in your Quick Parts list that starts with “U”, you may be able to get away with just typing the letter “u” and then F3. (I can get away with this because my version of Office is in Japanese, so there aren’t any other words that start with English letters. I am not sure if this will work with an English version of Word.)

Et voila. Right now, I still prefer the old functionality of autocomplete (because I didn’t have to press anything for the completed version to pop up), but I imagine I will eventually get used to this new way of doing things.