Hello MS Word Experts



I would like to insert Wildcards into my Word 2011 (Mac) Documents.

Principally I’d like to be able to put the Filename into the Document, but i imagine (i use wildcards another program and find it very useful) other wildcards could also be useful (time/date stamp).

Does this feature exist? I looked it up on the web and only found wildcards described in conjunction with: “find or replace text”. Incase anyone is unsure of what i’m specifically asking about. In at least one other program (Sibelius 7, a music notation program) one can insert aliases such as the one listed below, which are then automatically changed for the description that they are referring to. This is useful if one is creating documents where the Filename is continuously changing and one doesn’t want to go to the bother of changing that aspect of the text in the document. This can be especially tedious if the document is 100 pages long and you have this element as a footnote on each page.

\$Filename\

I would venture to guess that such an important word-processing program has to have this same feature, but i can’t find it. And..i have tried putting in a wildcard - to no avail.

Any ideas? Many many many thanks for any tips and your time as well!

Peter

ok...figured this out but two problems in order of bad..to not so bad:

1. autotext doesn't update it's self when i update the filename. Ie. "filename 02.docx" doesn't automatically become "filename 03.docx" when i update the filename to "filename 03.docx". Is this a bug or does word just not do this? Or am i doing something wrong?

2. Anyone know how ".docx" would like this autotext just to list the filename...but without the suffix.

Many thanks for any replys!

Ok, found this:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/832897

in a nutshell: "Create a macro to automatically update the field." Is this the only way to get autotext to work?

if it is of any relevance, my OS is 10.9.4

thanks for any possible future replies

You might get farther if you searched for "user variable" as well as "wildcard"? and/or tried the Word for Mac forum. Can't find the address, unfortunately; the search on this forum rejects 'mac' as too short or too common to be a search term …

Never used Word on a Mac, but what you seem to be trying for is just including a document property field in the footer (or elsewhere in the document). Word for Windows has a shortcut to force the updating of all fields, and an option to update all fields before printing.

Why not use a FILENAME field? See: https://support.office.com/en-us/art...2-4482aece26bc?

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