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I make intensive use of Office autocorrect feature for fast typing (which I use as a kind of autocompletion - shorthand / stenography). I have been able to modify the ACL file for Office 2011 applications (which works great in Word), but Office 365 comes with a separate 2015 version of Outlook and I cannot find the dedicated file for autocorrect entries.

After a few tests, I found out that Outlook does take the Mac OS system dictionary entries into account (which are stored in an .sqlite file in /Library/Dictionaries/CoreDataUbiquitySupport/username/UserDictionary/local/store/UserDictionary.db - in case you're wondering where it was...). So I have been able to add my own dictionary entries in this sqlite file and Outlook does take them into account. Heck, Outlook gets real slow when this system dictionary is fed with more than 3000 entries (I bet you're wondering wtf is in this list, never mind).

Luckily, I found out that Outlook's Autocorrect feature also uses its own set of entries (which can be manually updated through Outlook Preferences > Autocorrect) - these work better and faster. So now I just need to find this damn' little file where I can store my huge list of words through a bulk import…

A long search on the Web made me realize I am probably a very lonely user of Outlook's autocorrect feature (at least on Mac)… Any weird guy like me out there who would incidentally know the path to this golden little file?

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  • You might try looking in the main application bundle Microsoft Outlook.app/Contents/Resources/AutoCorrect/. The filenames are Default ACL [English], etc. — however, they might not be (easily) editable.
    – l'L'l
    Apr 21, 2015 at 11:27
  • That was a smart guess, but unfortunately, that is the default autocorrect that comes with the app installer but not the one that is actually used by the installed version of Outlook. Best guess so far, though : I hadn't thought about looking inside the .app package content!
    – barakadam
    Apr 22, 2015 at 12:07

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I believe the autocorrect entries are shared by all Office applications.

Unlike Office 2011 which stores the user's autocorrect items in the ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/ folder, Office 2015 Preview seems to use a more obscure location:

~/Library/Group Containers/*.Office/Microsoft Office ACL [English]

Where the * represents a string of characters which may or may not be significant (so I've removed them).

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  • Congrats to MikeLimaOscar : next step will be to be able to edit the ACL file, but this is definitely the one. Office 2011's ACL files cannot be used as are in this location (not same encoding) and Windows Office ACL files either. I still have to figure out what method to use to quickly import my 3000 entries, but this is a major step into reaching Nirvana! Thanks MikeLimaOscar
    – barakadam
    Apr 23, 2015 at 18:46
  • @barakadam: glad to be able to help - I hope it doesn't mean I'm too weird! The ACL format doesn't look too complicated possibly using UTF-32 encoding with some "glue".
    – MikeLimaOscar
    Apr 24, 2015 at 14:36
  • Yes, header information seems difficult to control in ACL format... I will find the solution. Thx
    – barakadam
    Apr 25, 2015 at 15:53

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