Generating a Letter

[Shanna86]

Hi all,

I'm very new here and have a question about creating a document. I'm certainly willing to learn about advanced options/techniques in Word but I thought I would see if what I'm trying to do is even possible first.

At work we use Office 2013 and I am trying to write letters in Word. There are a few things I'd like to do in hopes of speeding up the process.

I'd like to have a form where I can type a person's name in once and it will be filled in throughout the form. Currently I use "find and replace" for that by using previous letters as a template for a new letter and what works well. What would be great would be an easy way to change pronouns. If I have a blank form is there a way to populate fields with the correct pronouns? Maybe through a prompt that will fill in "he" in the places I specify and then "him" in places, etc.? I suppose I could have a template that has a pronoun placeholder and I could use find and replace again to insert the correct words.

I think the hardest thing I'd like to do is insert long pieces of text. Say in a letter there are 5 possible topics I typically cover and in this letter I want to cover topic 2 and 4. I could just have the language pre-written somewhere and I could copy and paste it in as needed. I'm wondering if there's a different way. Like typing in a phrase/code would insert text? I had thought autocorrect would work, like typing ".topic1" would insert what I need but there's a character limit. Is there another feature somewhere that doesn't have a character limit?



I'm sure names and pronouns are easy enough to sort out but my dream form letter would be something that opens with a series of prompts or check boxes where I could just fill in the name, gender, and topics needed and the letter would basically write itself!

Thanks for any insight on this issue