Microsoft® Word 2010 In Depth

16. Working with Fields and Forms

Understanding Fields

Fields are the often-underappreciated placeholders that work behind the scenes in a document. They help perform the magic involved with many of the most powerful features in Word, such as mail merging, indexing, automatic generation of tables of contents, automatic figure numbering, cross-referencing, page numbering, and more.

There are many different types of fields, each with a specific purpose, but they break down into three main categories. You can use fields to do the following:

• Insert text or graphics into the document, such as page numbering, dates and times, text from other documents, graphics from external files, document properties, or calculated values.

• Mark a location for ...