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What Happens to AutoCorrect Entries When You Install Office 95 Over Office 4.x

We wrote this FAQ to answer the many questions we receive on this topic from our clients and other inquiring minds in the many electronic communities we frequent.

If you've already installed Word 7 (Office 95) and your AutoCorrect entries are missing, see our article Rescuing Lost AutoCorrect Entries When You Upgrade from Word 6 to Word 7 (Office 95).

AutoCorrect entries from your copy of Office 4.x should survive with no problems when you do an install of Office 95 over Office 4.x (thereby replacing Office 4.x). This is true unless multiple users were sharing the same PC or you deleted your Word 6 Normal.dot before installing Office 95. However, if you install Office 95 side-by-side with Office 4.x (Office 4.x remains installed along with Office 95), you will probably need to force Word 95 to see your Word 6 Normal.dot in order for the ordinary "install over" behavior to occur. The easiest way to do this is to copy your Word 6 Normal.dot into your Office 95 \MSOffice\Templates folder, ideally before you open Word 95 for the first time.

Here is the official word from our contacts at Microsoft.

"We are not aware of any problems in migrating an AutoCorrect list when you install Word 95 on top of Word 6. A ‘side-by-side’ installation (i.e., you keep both Word 6 and Word 95) is a different story.

Here's what happens when you install Office 95 over Office 4.x.

In Word 6, all AutoCorrect entries are stored in Normal.dot. If for some reason Normal.dot gets deleted, Word [6] rebuilds it with the default entries (teh, adn, etc.). If multiple users use the same Normal.dot, they have a shared AutoCorrect list.

In Office 95, there is a "base file" (MSOFFICE.ACL) which contains the default shipping plain-text entries. (Formatted-text entries still go in Normal.dot [Office 95 applications other than Word do not support formatted AutoCorrect entries].) When a first-time Office 95 user logs on, Office creates a personal AC file (usually [username].ACL) and puts all of the contents of MSOFFICE.ACL in there.

If Word discovers plain text entries in Normal.dot, it moves them to the user's personal ACL the first time that user runs Office 95."

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