Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

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•Under Length of summary at the bottom of the dialog box, Word shows you the

length of the summary relative to the full document. The default is 25 percent,

which means that the summary is exactly one-quarter the length of the docu-

ment as a whole. When you change the percentage and then click OK, the

AutoSummarize dialog box goes away, and Word re-creates the summary accord-

ing to your whims.

Working with Fields

The concept of temporary placeholders is one of mankind’s greatest inventions. When

you change a tire, the jack acts as a 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 stands there patiently as a model, so the highly paid

star doesn’t have to stand there for hours while the technicians fiddle with shadows.

When a magazine designer doesn’t yet have the photo that will go on page 3, 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 infor-

mation (see page 254).

• Create indexes (page 247) and tables of contents (page 242).

• Create invoices that calculate their own totals (page 176).

• Create cross-references (page 239) and captions (page 235).

Inserting Fields

You can’t type a field into a document. You must ask Word to create it in one of the

following ways:

• Choose a command that creates a field. These are usually found on the Insert

menu, such as Insert→Date and Time.

• Choose Insert→Field and choose one of the available field types from the Field

dialog box (see Figure 6-16).

• Press c-F9 and type the field code, if you know it. (The field code is a short piece

of code, enclosed in braces {like this}, that tells Word what kind of information

will go there.)

You may never have to create a field manually. Most of the time, fields are built right

into a Word feature or another command. For instance, when you choose

Insert→Date and Time, Cross-reference, Bookmark, Footnote, or Caption (all of

which are described in the following sections of this chapter), Word uses a field to

AutoSummarize

chapter 6: advanced word processing 229

define the location and content of these features. When you choose any of the items

on the Insert→AutoText→Header/Footer submenu, Word uses fields to insert these

pieces of document information.

However, there are hundreds more fields at your disposal in Word, and inserting

them is as easy as choosing them from a list in the Field dialog box.

Building fields in the Field dialog box

To place a field where the insertion point is located, choose Insert→Field to open

the Field dialog box as shown in Figure 6-16. Because there are so many fields in

Word, the program displays them in category groups. When you click a category in

the left box, the list of fields in that category appears in the right box.

When you click a field name on the right side, the field code appears in the “Field

code” box below (DATE in the Figure 6-16 example). A more complete description

appears in the Description panel near the bottom of the dialog box. You can learn a

lot about fields just by clicking and reading the descriptions.

Modifying Fields with Switches

The Field dialog box has an Options button that lets you specify in more detail how

you want a field to look and act. When you click it, the Field Options dialog box

displays any applicable switches (software options), as shown in Figure 6-17. Like

Figure 6-16:

Top: The Field dialog box, showing a list of

placeholder fields you can use in a Word

document. Clicking Options opens a dialog box

with a list of switches available for the current

field. In this case, the switches control how the

date is formatted.

Bottom: A field code and its results.

Working

with Fields