We’re in the proces of rolling out WinXP/Off2003 NL, migrating from Win98/Off97 NL. I ran into a peculiar problem today. Someone uses a lot of customised AutoCorrect items in Excel and of course wanted them to be migrated to Off2003 too.
So in Word97 I used the MS AutoCorrect backup utility (located in C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOfficeMacro’sMacros8.dot) to export the list to a Word doc. I saved it with the proposed Dutch name “Reservekopie voor AutoCorrectie-items”, which is also the first line in the doc.
After the migration I used the MS AutoCorrect backup utility (located in C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice11MacrosSupport.dot) again. At first everything appeared to be OK; all items were visible in Word. But when the user looked in Excel, the list was nearly empty! Despite the fact that both Word and Excel are supposed to use the same list…
It took me a while to understand what happened. It’s caused by the different way the AutoCorrect backup utility behaves. In Word97 NL the exported doc has a Dutch first line, as I mentioned above. Also the heading (first row) of the table is in Dutch. And the cell in the third column (RTF) contains either “Onwaar” or “Waar”. But in Word2003 NL the utility expects that everything is stated in English…!
The macro tests for the literal “False” in the third cell of the row. If so, the entry is plain text and added to the list in the .ACL file. If not, it’s formatted text which is saved in Normal.dot. So, because the Dutch word for False, “Onwaar” fails that test, every entry is considered to be formatted text and saved in Normal.dot. That accounts for the fact that the whole list is visible in Word and not in Excel, which doesn’t use Normal.dot…
So, once you know this, the solution is very simple:
– start the first line in the document with the word “AutoCorrect”
– do a find and replace all “Onwaar” -> “False” followed by “Waar” -> “True”
– then run the AutoCorrect backup utility to Restore (import) te AutoCorrect list
Although I obviously cannot test it myself, I think that something like this is the case with every localised version of Office 97.
