Microsoft Word - repetitive text

[ECB]

I've been given a word document, it's about 12,000 words.

It's a report for clients and we issue say 200 of these a year.

In the report there are 5 "fields" that repeat through the document around 100 times in total. Client name, project name, inventory of subjects etc etc

What I want to achieve is type in each field once, and the rest of the report auto populates, referencing the field. The kind of thing that you can do in your sleep in excel.

IN word, I think some of the options are:

1) Bookmark and Cross Reference. For some reason, when I'm trying to fill the bookmark I often end up deleting it.
2)Link to an exernal file such as the cells in an excel spreadsheet
3) Insert a field - I'm struggling to understand docvariables

or is there another way using Visual Basic - or some other way, Ive always tried to avoid using word and writing in excel, but reluctantly I think there are other elements within this report that probably mean word is the right choice.

Any pointers where to look or help gratefully accepted!

 

[Macropod]

For the 'input' fields, you could insert Word's FILLIN field, then bookmark that for cross-referencing purposes. From then on, pressing Ctrl-A, F9 will cause all the FILLIN fields to prompt for input and, as they're updated, all the cross-references to update also. No code required.

 

[ECB]

That's great thank you - that's almost there. The ctrl-A F9 doesn't seem to work on a Mac or I'm doing something wrong but I think I can work it out from there.

One other little issue you might be able to help me with - I seem to inadvertently delete the bookmark, actually, once I fix the prompting that won't be an issue as I won't be editing text, just inputting it.

Thanks again for your help.

 

[Macropod]

On Macs, F9 should work without the need for Ctrl-A. If you bookmark a FILLIN field as suggested an update the content using the field's prompt, you won't have the bookmark deletion problem.