Som of my users experienced this autotextproblem. Prewiew shows little
boxes, and they are also inserted in the document, or something totally
different shows up, like a sentence form a letter, the heading of a mail,
none of them are doing what they are supposed to.. The entries are stored (as
I can see) in normal.dot, which I actually do not understand how they have
managed to do, as normal.dot has been centralized and read-only. Yeah, I
know - I am not supposed to do that, and we are about to change this. Later
the normal.dot will be local, and instead they will have a .dot in their word
startup folder.
But why is autotext doing these weird things, and how can i possibly avoid it?

Hi ?B?TGlzdHJvbQ==?=,

Som of my users experienced this autotextproblem. Prewiew shows little
boxes, and they are also inserted in the document, or something totally
different shows up, like a sentence form a letter, the heading of a mail,
none of them are doing what they are supposed to.. The entries are stored (as
I can see) in normal.dot, which I actually do not understand how they have
managed to do, as normal.dot has been centralized and read-only. Yeah, I
know - I am not supposed to do that, and we are about to change this. Later
the normal.dot will be local, and instead they will have a .dot in their word
startup folder.
But why is autotext doing these weird things, and how can i possibly avoid it?

1. AutoText is always stored in Normal.dot, unless the user explicitly specifies
a different template

2. If these entries ARE in a Normal.dot, then the users' machines are not linked
to your centralized Normal.dot - Word has, for some reason - generated a local
copy and is using that

3. Given your description, the template container (Normal.dot) has probably been
damaged at the structural level; the character codes + font aren't being
recognized correctly. It might be possible to retrieve the entries' text, using
VBA, but probably not any formatting.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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