I know very little about macros and I am failing to understand what you just said, I will need to research on it. However, security it not an issue, all files are distributed to be individually worked on and remain unshared until printed by the users themselves.


Changes may occur on the primary document over the course of time, so the linked ones need to be updated as soon as opened (it would have been delightful if they documents could update silently, without the need of opening them, but I suppose this is impossible).

This is not an option, by default I have it off, and others do as well, I need compatibilty and convenience, so the macro is necessary.

It beats the purpose if I tell users: Do A, and B, and C, and D, and then the documents will play nicely.

We partially can assuming completely default settings across all platforms. As far as I can see although the macro updates the fields, the underlining and field shading remains. However, if I manually select "Update Fields" both the field shading and the underlining go away unless if I click somewhere on the document. Don't you think a macro can be created that updates similarly to a manual field update so that the document looks "clean" on launch?

Which is precisely what the 'update automatic links at open' option does.

Already, though, you're proposing to run a macro every time users open a document (and you're not even sure yet how many documents/templates you'll need to add the macro to), to both set the 'UpdateFieldsAtPrint' and 'UpdateLinksAtPrint' options - each of which also only need doing once... Given that setting the 'update automatic links at open' option is something one ever only needs to do once, your concerns are way out of proportion to what's involved IMHO.

There is nothing about the macro you posted that would cause field shading to display - or not - and whether something can be done about it depends on the cause (which I'm not aware of).

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