There's definitely some Twilight Zone things that can happen to
autotextlists.  In my experience, although they offer great promise for
simplifying work, they often tend to get mysteriously corrupted over time,
even when carefully stored in a template (other than Normal.dot)  attached to
a document.  Sometimes one or more unintended autotext items mysteriously
start appearing in the autotext dropdown, even though they were never defined
in that autotext list!  Sometimes one, or all, of my autotext fields,
suddenly start showing me ALL my autotext items, not just the ones I defined
in an Autotext List. In one case, after working properly for many weeks, I
suddenly notice that when I clicked on the field for Autotextlist A, the
autotext list items that I had defined for Autotext List B were appearing
instead of the the items I had so tediously defined for Autotext List A!  For
these reasons, I've very regrettably begun moving away from autotext lists -
they take a lot of time to set up, and when they get mysteriously corrupted,
fixing them takes at least as long again. I am pretty sure they don't save
much time, overall, because of the hassles involved with creating and
maintaining them.  At one time I thought they were going to be very helpful
to our workgroup and rolled out some templates to help the team work faster,
with some autotext list items in them.  They worked for a while, and then
problems like I've described, above, started happening.  Autotextlists exist
and reside kind of in the background, and lack convenient dialogs that might
otherwise make them easy to create and manage.  To me, although they appear
to be a great novelty feature and a source of interesting discussions among
Word MVPs in theory,  putting these kinds of features into serious, reliable
practice has been disappointing, at least for me, despite the enormous
patience and time I've expended on them. Other users may disagree, but I have
reluctantly come to feel that they are not robust enough - or, maybe, at
least in my case, idiot-proof enough - for Prime Time usage.