Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP

Using Fields Intelligently

Behind many of Word's most powerful features sits a peculiar document element called a field. Word fields are placeholders whose contents change dynamically; they typically work in the background, invisibly, displaying the correct data onscreen and in print, based on information within the current document, in other documents, or from external sources. For example, if you put a {Date} field in your document, it displays the current date each time you open the document.

Word supports more than 70 different fields. Use them when you want to accomplish tasks such as these:

• Show the current day in a document ({date}, {time}), or the time the document was last printed ({printdate}).

• Construct a paragraph numbering scheme ...