Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP

Formatting Field Results

Unless you add a switch inside the field to change formatting, the field result takes on the formatting of the first nonblank character of the field.

For example, if you have a field that says {Author} , with the "A" in Times New Roman, 10-point italic, the result of the field takes on that formatting: Douglas Adams.

Word has three different field switches that control the appearance and formatting of field code results.

General \* Format Switches

The most common field switch is the general formatting switch:

\* mergeformat

This switch tells Word to ignore the formatting of the first character of the field, and instead to use whatever formatting you apply to the field itself.

For example, say you're typing along in ...