Office & productivity software forum: What File Contains My Personalized Dictionary in Word 2003?

Carol,

I don't know about Word 2003, but I can tell you about Word XP and previous versions.

I would start with having a look at Tools>Options>File Locations. That shows the folder these files are in, but it might be wrong or incomplete.

Custom dictionaries have a file extension of .dic (like custom.dic, the default one) and the autocorrect list has a file extension of .acl.

Go into My Computer>Tools>Folder Options>View and UNCHECK "hide extension for known file types". Then search for *.dic and *.acl. I suppose they are somewhere in your My Documents and Settings.

You can copy these files to a safe location (burn to CD or copy to a USB stick) or do a non-destructive reinstall of Windows XP, so they they where they are. If you configure everything the same after the reinstallation of Windows, you can just copy them back to the same locations. But it could be the new config expects them on a different location. Then simply fill a few entries, check where the new files are and copy the old ones to that location.

If these files contain information you don't want to lose, I would recommend to include them on your regular backup, combined with all other files you do backup (like documents and photo's).

Note:
- The autocorrect lists seem to be different in Word 2003. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/826147 tells all about it. I don't really now: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;207748 was the old one for Office 2000, and it doesn't mention .acl either. You have some research to do, I'm afraid.



Hope this helps.


Kees