autocorrect to insert diacritics behaviour

Question

Sometimes I need to type Polish in Word or Outlook (Office 2010). To insert Polish diacritic characters I assigned a number of shortcuts, e.g., ‘Alt+a’ inserts ‘ą’. It works well in Word but does not work in Outlook.

Q1: Does anybody know how to make Outlook to recognize these shortcuts?

The ‘Alt+letter’ is good, but requires pressing two keys (and three for capitals) at a time. I thought, I could use autocorrect to replace, say ‘;a’ with ‘ą’. This would be much easier for touch typing. In Word it works if the diacritic is at the end of a word but not if it is in the middle. And, it does not work at all in Outlook.

Q2: Why Word ignores ’;a’ in the middle of a word?

Q3: How to make Outlook to use both methods, or just one if both is asking for too many?

Answer 1

AutoCorrect entries don't fire until you end the word by pressing a space or punctuation mark, which is why your shortcut doesn't work in the middle of a word. I think you're stuck with an ordinary keyboard shortcut in general, but if there are certain words containing the "ą" character that occur frequently, you could create an AutoCorrect entry for each one.

Answer 2

Not ideal, but if you use an autocorrect that both starts and ends with a word delimiter, it will fire immediately - for example ;a;