So let’s go over how to use text replacements in Office for Mac! We’re using Outlook for our example screenshots but the steps are the same in other Office apps like Word.
If you’ve already added text replacement shortcuts to macOS in System Preferences, you’ll need to re-enter them for Office, but since all of the Office apps share a unified text replacement database, you’ll only need to do it once. The somewhat good news is that the Office apps themselves have their own text replacement database as part of the AutoCorrect feature. Thanks to a relatively recent update to Microsoft Office, the programs in that suite (like Outlook, Word, and Excel) no longer respect the shortcuts you’ve added in System Preferences > Keyboard > Text, which is kind of a bummer if you depend on those for emailing folks quickly. …wait, actually they no longer work in Outlook. This saves me a ton of time! And these shortcuts work all around the Mac: in Mail, in Pages, in Outlook… I’ve personally set up a ton of these shortcuts, as I need to send the same instructions over and over again to different people. For example, if you type the phrase “let me know if you have any questions” often, you can use a shortcut like “lmk” to drop in that text without you having to type the whole thing. As you may know (especially if you read this previous tip of mine), you can configure custom text replacements on the Mac.
