

In the Display Options, you’ll need to make sure that the fields will update themselves before you print the document otherwise, you’ll have to remember to select them all and press F9. You need to check three settings in Word Options (accessible via the File tab in Word 2010-2016 or the Office Button in Word 2007): Making sure the fields auto-update when printing The preliminaries, or, setting yourself up to succeedĪs with so many areas in Microsoft Word, some of this depends on how your installation is set up.
#Duplicate form fields in word how to
If you already know how to select text with your mouse and type, you can do this. The good news here is you don’t have to be a propeller-head to pull this off. So I settled on Microsoft Word’s Bookmarks feature. But this reader requested something that works like Adobe’s forms, where you can fill in one field and, if the field is duplicated elsewhere, those field copies will automatically repeat the same information (and self-update if the information in the original field changes). You can engineer the living daylights out of this if you’re so inclined. There are a number of ways to approach this - I’ve heard of people using Mail Merge, ASK fields (which could be used in conjunction with the technique below), FILLIN fields, macros, etc. This reader gave me a good excuse to go digging around to find something that works. I’d always been interested in this question myself (since I’ve run into this problem with my own forms), but I just never took the time to really find a good solution. I’ve read something about making each field an REF field, but I don’t understand how to do it, and I’ve tried tons of Google search results. Is there a way to autopopulate a field? I’d like it to work similar to Adobe, where if you give the fields the same name, the text in one will automatically fill up in all of the others. Making them all a field will mean that the assistant will have to retype the same word at least 23 times in a will. As of now, all the paralegal has to do is do a find/replace and change all the sons, to daughters, or children, and wife to husband, etc. make all of those relationships fields, but I think that would be longer. There are several places in the will, where it will say, “I leave my sons…or my wife, Mary,” for example. She gave me a sample will, medical power of attorney, and some correspondence. I’m trying to create some forms for our estates and trusts attorney. If you’ve tried to make yourself a homegrown forms database, knowing that you’ll have to go in each time and fill in the variable information (name, he/she, his/her, son/daughter/children, etc.) in all (and I do mean all) the right places, then you can appreciate this reader’s dilemma: Updates all fields in the selected text.) If you do this whenever you change the bookmarked text, your REF fields will always be updated.Ever had one of those forms that repeats someone’s name or some other piece of information, um, repeatedly? Say, a will or a power of attorney or something similar? (Ctrl+A selects the entire document, and F9 The closest thing to automatic updating that I can suggest is to press Ctrl+A and then F9. You indicated that you will frequently change the bookmarked text and you want the REF fields to update automatically. If you need to delete them, use Backspace to delete the first character and Del to delete the last character after you make the other changes.īesides the techniques for creating a REF field in the help topic, in my opinion, the easiest way to create a REF field is to type the name of the bookmark, highlight it, press Ctrl+F9, and then press F9. To preserve the bookmark, never highlight theįirst or last character of the bookmarked text. If you change the text after you create the bookmark, you must be careful not to delete the bookmark itself. When you create the bookmark you need to highlight (select) the text that the bookmark will embrace.
