Nail Down a Word 2003 Template with Document Information Fields
- What Are Document Information Fields?
- The Properties Dialog Box
- Putting the Theory into Practice
- Security Issues
According to Finnish legend, Vainamoinen built the world by singing. I always thought that was a pretty keen trick, but I've never been able to get it to work with software. I claim that's because input devices are lagging behind, but the cruel among my acquaintance say my voice lacks magic. On the off-chance that melodic vocalization isn't helping you design and build Word docs either, we'll look at how to use document information fields to knock together a Word 2003 template. This method isn't as showy as a song, but it gets the job done, and it won't matter if you're tone-deaf.
What Are Document Information Fields?
The document information fields appear in a tidy list whenever you launch Word's Field dialog box (Insert, Field) and select the Document Information category, as shown in Figure 1.
The data in your fields has to come from someplace, and in the case of document information fields that place is the Properties dialog box, which contains five tabs chockfull of data. The following table shows a breakdown of how each of the document information fields is populated from this source.
Field Name |
Tab in the Properties Dialog Box |
Inserts This Information... |
Author |
Summary |
Contents of the Author box |
Comments |
Summary |
Contents of the Comments box |
DocProperty |
Custom |
Information from the Custom tab (property must be specified) |
FileName |
General |
Name of the file |
FileSize |
General |
Size of the file (in bytes) |
Info |
Summary |
Information from boxes on the Summary tab (property must be specified) |
Keywords |
Summary |
Contents of the Keywords box |
LastSavedBy |
Statistics |
Name of last person to save or modify the document |
NumChars |
Statistics |
Number of characters |
NumPages |
Statistics |
Number of pages |
NumWords |
Statistics |
Number of words |
Subject |
Summary |
Contents of the Subject box |
Template |
Summary |
File name of the document template |
Title |
Summary |
Contents of the Title box |