Hi. I am switching from Open Office to Word out of necessity (new job only has Word 2010) and have researched online for hours and cannot find how to do these tasks which are simple in Open Office:

I have roughly 200 Open Office documents that I need to switch over to word in this fashion and it seems that copying the body and redoing the fields is the fastest way. See 1-3 below: I tried saving as word and then opening in word and the sex/gender fields would not work although in developer I see them as he/she etc. The first instance of "Name" would still pop-up and fill but it would not allow copying to other parts of the text and actually does not appear as an editable function/field -- it just magically is there with no reference in the editing.




1. Insert a text form field and have a prompt pop-up to enter text. ie -- enter a person's name that will then appear throughout the document. On first instance pop-up with "Name?". I found how to actually do the field but I get no prompt to enter text. I am using legacy text form field to do this so far.

2. Have the Name auto-populate designated areas of a document. So far all I can find is to Bookmark the original field and use insert cross-reference. This does not auto-populate. I need to click on each cross reference and hit f9. It seems to auto-populate if a protect the file from editing but I do not want the files protected from editing.

3. How do I enter gender throughout a document. In Open Office I wound have an original field of he/she (would pop-up on opening the document to fill in) and then copy all the he/she fields as needed. For other instances of him/her, etc I would use a simple equation if sex (original instance saved as sex) = he then him if not then her, etc...and copy these to where they needed to be in the text.

Is office really this behind the times or am I just clueless about finding this info?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Dave
If I understand you correctly you want to enter a name for example in a document and then have it appear in specified areas elsewhere in the document. If this is correct you can achieve this in the following way:
1. Create a Bookmark in the first location (say called NAME). Then enter your name against that bookmark.
2. Click on each location where you want this name repeated and seect Insert followed by Hyperlink, then select the Hyperlink called NAME. This will then be repeated in every location in the doucment where you insert a hyperlink.
Hope this helps.
If I misunderstood then please come back to the forum.
Good luck.
Tony

Perhaps OpenOffice and Word have different ways of doing the same thing? I'd start (if you haven't done so already!) by saving your OpenOffice file in .odt format, since Word is supposed to understand this; far from seamless, I know, but it might help.