UNHCE Information Technology & Distance Education Blog

Source: WordTips by DCI

Special fields have a great number of uses in Word. You already know
that you can use fields to insert everything from the date and time to
summary information for a document. There may be times, however, when
you don't want to use a field for information.

As an example, let's say that you have a template that includes a
field for today's date in it. When you create a document based on the
template, today's date appears in the document. You make changes to
the document, and then save it to disk. When you later open the
document, instead of the original date, it contains the date of when
you opened the file.

To get around this, you need to change the field contents to plain
text before you save the file. In this instance, you would follow
these steps:

1. Create your new document based on the template. Today's date
should appear, as normal.
2. Select the date in the document.
3. Press Ctrl+Shift+F9. This converts the field to actual text.
Thus, the date is switched from a field to real text for the
date.
4. Make any other changes necessary in the document.
5. Save the document as normal.

That's it. The next time you open the document, the date remains
unchanged. You can also use this technique with any other field to
convert it to text.