If you have been following this blog for awhile you will know that I build and rebuild machines on a reasonably frequent basis. One drawback to this that I have to keep re-creating the Autocorrect entries. I do a lot of technical writing much of which involves full names of products and correct capitalisation. I saw an entry on the TechNet scripting center that showed how to add an entry to the autocorrect list. It was in VBScript but thats not an issue as we can easily convert it to something more useful :-)
I ended up with a module consisting of four functions
- Get-AutoCorrectEntry
- Export-AutoCorrectEntry
- Add-AutoCorrectEntry
- Import-AutoCorrectEntry
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| #Requires -version 2.0
function Get-AutoCorrectEntry {
param (
[switch] $all
)
$word = New-Object -ComObject Word.Application
if ($all) {$word.AutoCorrect.Entries}
else {$word.AutoCorrect.Entries | Select Name, Value}
$word.Quit()
}
function Export-AutoCorrectEntry {
param (
[parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
[string] $path
)
Get-AutoCorrectEntry | where {$_.Value -ne "*"} | Export-Csv -Path $path -NoTypeInformation
}
function Add-AutoCorrectEntry {
param (
[parameter(Mandatory=$true, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true)]
[string] $name,
[parameter(Mandatory=$true, ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true)]
[string] $value
)
begin {
$word = New-Object -ComObject Word.Application
$ace = $word.AutoCorrect.Entries
}
process {$ace.Add($name, $value)}
end {$word.Quit()}
}
function Import-AutoCorrectEntry {
param (
[parameter(Mandatory=$true)]
[string] $path
)
Import-Csv -Path $path | Add-AutoCorrectEntry
} |
Get-AutoCorrectEntry creates an object for Word and dumps the contents of the AutoCorrect Entries collection. Default is to just display the name and the value where name is the bad text and value is the replacement text. The –all switch dumps everything but we won’t usually need that info
Export-AutoCorrectEntry calls Get-AutoCorrectEntry add dumps the results to a file using Export-Csv. Using where {$_.Value -ne "*"} restricts the output to the entries I’ve created rather than including Word’s own entries
Add-AutoCorrectEntry creates a new entry. It takes name and value parameters then creates an object for word, gets the AutoCorrect Entries then uses the Add method to create the new entry. I’ve used the begin/process/end scriptblocks so it behaves nicely on the pipeline
Import-AutoCorrectEntry reads a csv file then calls Add-AutoCorrectEntry
Next time I re-install Office I can dump the entries and then import them after installation. I can even move my entries between machines. I created this using Windows 7 and Office 2010 TP but there is no reason for it not to work with other versions of Office.