Originally Posted by macropod

Try the attached document. It contains both an acronym/abbreviation list (that you can edit) and a macro (AcronymManager) to process any acronyms/abbreviations in whatever is the active document. The basic requirement for list management is that each entry be a separate paragraph, with the full expression listed first, followed by a tab then the acronym/abbreviation. Of course, you also can't have two entries with the same acronym/abbreviation.

The code includes comments to show how a separate document might be used for the acronym/abbreviation list instead of the one in the attachment. That might be useful if you were to add the macro to Word's Normal template.

How it works:
Basically, the macro uses a loop to call a series of Find/Replace operations to edit the text in the target document, replacing all occurrences of a given expression and its acronym/abbreviation with just the acronym/abbreviation and, for the first occurrence only, both the full expression and the acronym/abbreviation, the latter enclosed in brackets.