The paragraph mark stores the formatting for the paragraph. If you want your AutoText entry text to be stored with the paragraph formatting for all the paragraphs in the entry, including the last paragraph, make sure the paragraph mark at the end of the last paragraph is included in your selection. RELATED: How to Display Non-Printing Characters in Word

Then, highlight the content and click the “Insert” tab. To begin, create a new Word document and enter the content (text, images, tables, etc.) that you want to add as an AutoText entry. You can add AutoText entries to custom templates, but there are limitations with this that we will discuss later in this article.

This limits the availability of your AutoText entries to your machine only, unless you share your Normal.dotm template with other machines. By default, new AutoText entries are stored in the Normal.dotm template. You can only store AutoText entries in templates, not in the documents themselves. RELATED: How to Reference Text from Other Documents in Microsoft Word So, if you aren’t allowed to install third-party programs on your work computer, for example, you can still use AutoText. That’s great because it works in every app, not just Word, but AutoText has a few advantages of its own–namely, it has more formatting options (especially Word-specific ones) than PhraseExpress, and it’s available wherever Word is. There is other software out there, like the free PhraseExpress for Windows, that performs a similar task system-wide. However, once content is inserted using an AutoText entry, that content will NOT be automatically updated when you change the AutoText entry. The trick discussed in that article is similar to using an AutoText entry. NOTE: We’ve previously written about how to reference text from other documents in Word so you can insert reusable content into other documents that will automatically update. You can also add as many custom building blocks as you want. Quick Parts and AutoText entries are also known as “Building Blocks” and Word comes with many predefined building blocks. In addition to AutoText entries, the Quick Parts feature allows you to insert document properties (such as title and author) and fields (such as dates and page numbers). The AutoText feature has been part of Office for a long time, but is now part of Quick Parts, which was added to Office 2007. The AutoText feature in Word allows you to store these chunks of text and quickly insert them with a few keystrokes, so you can waste less time typing. We all have a few large chunks of text we have to type regularly–like your address, long names or phrases, or even tables and images you use often.

Create text box in word in template