Add custom fields and modify field properties

- [Instructor] Word keeps track of many different properties that relate to your document. The tracking begins as soon as the document is created and continues on each time the document is opened, edited, printed and saved. These are all fields that can be inserted into your documents. But what if you wanted to create a custom field and store that information as a property? After watching this video you'll know how to create a new field, how to add that field to your document, and how to modify field properties. First, I want to start off by showing you a blank document and I encourage you to do the same thing, open a blank document, go to your insert tab, come over to your Quick Parts menu and go down to field. Now, these are all fields all ready available to us that we can insert into our document. We have different categories, date and time, document automation, document information, let's see what's in that category. Who the author is, comments about the document, oh, the file size, the file name, any keywords that are attached to the document in Excel. And each time you click on one of these, you'll have different field properties that you can update. So, document property, we can select author and click okay. And Instructor 2 is put into the document and that's how I'm logged into this computer. And when I click on it there's a gray background that's attached indicating that this is an inserted field. So, that's how you can work with the fields that are built right into your software. But what if we want to create our own custom fields? Let's take a look at another document. Custom fields. Now, this is a letter from H+ sport. We're going to be sending this particular letter out to one customer. And because this document will be specific to that customer I can go ahead and put the customer first name in as a field, the account manager, the account number, I have a couple of places for the account managers name. And I could also go ahead and create a field that has my name and my title. The great thing about creating custom fields is once you insert into the property with the value of this field is, in other words, what information you want shown when this field in inserted, if that information changes you can just go in to the properties and make the change. And the next time you open this document or work with this particular document, the information will be updated. So, if we start with a account manager of John Doe and a month later a new account manager is assigned, we can go into the properties of that field, make the change with the new persons name and this letter would automatically be updated. So, lets go to file and talk about the properties that we see on the right hand side. These are system properties that show how long the editing time is. Are there any titles or tags or comments? When was it last modified? When was it created? These are all system properties that are tracked. Let's click on properties and go to advance properties. And just general information about the document. Here's summary information where you can actually add a subject manager, et cetera. Here are the statistics on this particular document. Contents. Here's our title introductory letter to new client. This is what we're going to focus on for this video, custom. Now, when we create a custom tab we first put the name in, how we want this field to be displayed in our list of fields. This will be account manager. I can choose the type, is it text, date number, or is it simply a yes no field. Text is perfect. And the value as of right now the account manager is John Doe, I'll go ahead and click add. And now that field is available to us back in our Quick Parts menu. Well, let's add just one more, let's do account number this'll be a number, I'll keep it simple and choose one, two, three, four and click add, click okay, and let's go back to our document. So, we know we have our account manager. Let me highlight that place holder and delete it. We'll go to insert Quick Parts field. The fields that you create go in the document information category under document properties. Remember, we we're in the properties window when we created it. Here are the two we created account manager and account number. I'll select account manager, click okay, and that quickly John Doe has been inserted and we can do that for our second place holder for the account manager. And we put a space in there and then the account number, one, two, three, four, great. Okay, so we just had a change in our company, John is no longer the account manager. Let's go back to properties and update that. Custom account manager. Now that I've selected it I can come up here and I can put Jane Smith in, modifying it, now it's been updated, click okay. Go back to out document, John Doe is still in here, but if I right click on the field and choose update field, it'll update it for me. You can also use your F9 key on your keyboard. So, that is how you can create and manage custom fields in your Word documents.