Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Fields

The concept of temporaryplaceholders is one of humankind’s greatest inventions. When your car has a flat, the spare acts as a somewhat undersized stand-in for the tire, supporting the car until the new tire is in place. When technicians set up the lighting for a particular Hollywood movie scene, a low-paid extra models patiently, so the highly paid star doesn’t have to while the technicians fiddle with shadows. When a magazine designer doesn’t yet have the photo that will go on Layout, he’ll simply place a box there in the correct size and label it FPO (for position only), with the intention of replacing it with the finished photograph when it’s ready.

In Word, fields are temporary placeholders that stand in for information that may change or may come from another location on your hard drive—the current date, a page number, a place you’ve bookmarked, the name of a Word file, and so on. Fields, in fact, are the basis of some of Word’s most powerful features. They let you:

• Create form letters and address labels, and merge them with your contact information (see Preparing Data Sources).

• Create indexes (Indexing) and tables of contents (Creating a Table of Contents).

• Create invoices that calculate their own totals (Working with Fields in a Document).

• Create cross-references (Turning AutoCaptions Off) and captions (Viewing Bookmarks).

Inserting Fields

You can’t type a field into a document. You have to ask Word to create it in one of the following ways:

• Choose a command that creates a ...