Special Edition Using® Microsoft® Office Word 2003

Understanding Fields

A field is a set of instructions that you place in a document. Most often, these instructions tell Word to find or produce some specific text and place that text where you have inserted the field. In other cases, fields may be used to mark text, such as index entries, which you want Word to keep track of. In a few cases, Word fields can also tell Word to take an action that doesn't place new visible text in your document, such as running a macro that saves a file.

Using fields, you can delegate many details of assembling a document to your computer. For instance, suppose that your document contains figures and tables that need to be numbered consecutively. You can do this manually—and redo the numbering every time you insert ...