Hi
I am a newbie, so apart from my substantive problem, I have also a technical one.
My substantive problem is that for professional reasons I maintain a sort of diary in Word/Office XP, which by now has some 400 pages. I mark the beginning and the end of each entry with both the day and time stamp, which I make respectively using the Shift, Alt, D and the Shift, Alt, T combination. This timing is very important to me. This morning, all the date and time stamps, across 400+ pages of the document have reset, on their own, to these corresponding to the time I woke up my computer from sleep. When I closed the document without saving, they still remained "updated", which is a very serious issue for me, because I now cannot relate a given entry correctly to the actual date and time. What could have gone wrong, and how to prevent a recurrence of this misbehaviour?

My technical problem is that I use several computers with different OSs and Office versions. The options available to me when completing my profile do not allow listing all of them, I am forced to select only one. This seems somewhat impractical. When I may have, at some future time, a problem with my Office 2007 or 2010, would I need to edit my profile? And I couldn't find, how to contact the Admin to ask for His or Her advice, which is, of course a part of my learning curve on this forum.

When you insert a date/time stamp the way you have been doing, Word inserts DATE and TIME fields. These are volatile and are quite liable to update to the current date and time - which is what they are designed to do. Frankly, I'm surprised you've gotten away with this for so long. You can modify Word's field update behaviour somewhat (e.g. allowing them to update/not update at print time), but I'm not aware of any setting to prevent DATE and TIME fields updating when a document is opened. The only other course of action would be to lock them or convert them to text upon insertion. If you have a backup of the document, you might try opening that in WordPad, which should result in the document still showing whatever dates & times you previously had. You could then copy content from the WordPad session and paste it into your current document. Doing so will replace the fields with their displayed values.

As for your technical problem, users can only list a single profile. Fortunately, most problems are not version-specific (unless you're switching between Macs & PCs), so I'd suggest picking whichever combination best represents your typical setup. You can edit your profile at any time - you could also make special mention of the version if you think a problem might be version-specific.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

If, after you insert a field, after clicking in the field you press Ctrl+6 or Ctrl+Shift+F9, that will change the field to plain text.
Function Keys in Word 97-2016

The following macro will insert the current date and time not as a field.

See Installing Macros for what to do to make this work on your computer. You could attach the Alt+Shift+D keyboard shortcut to that macro.

For more about Date and Time fields, see Using Date Fields in Microsoft Word.

I've attached a template, that if put in your Word Startup Folder will give you the macro and keyboard shortcut in all of your documents.

Attached Files

TimeStampTemplate.zip (6.3 KB, 8 views)

Thank you guys, it's a very constructive advice, from both of you. Indeed, I was completely unaware that updating to a current date/time is the normal behaviour of these fields. They have never done this to me for over a year.