Addendum to Productive Scholar session on Microsoft Word Templates: Adding Fields to headers and footers.

Thanks to every­one who came to today’s ses­sion of the Pro­duc­tive Scholar, which fea­tured the advan­tages of using Styles in your doc­u­ments. I’d like to fol­low up about the ques­tion  asked about how to make a header (or footer) that has the auto-generated phrase, “page (cur­rent page num­ber) of (total num­ber of pages in doc­u­ment).”

While it’s mostly true that the new “rib­bon” in Microsoft Office makes many tools more vis­i­ble, it took me 20 min­utes to find the right place to add fields to text. Iron­i­cally, the new place these fea­tures are tucked away is called “Quick Parts;” on the Mac, the tools you’ll need remain on the top menu level of the “Insert” tab. You’ll notice that there are many other val­ues other than page num­bers in the “Fields” options.

If you want to know how to enter fields that will auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ate con­tent, there are steps and images below, for both PC and Mac.

Note: click­ing on the images below will open them larger, in a pop-up window.

Step 1

Open the “Insert” tab in the MS Word rib­bon, or the “Doc­u­ment Ele­ments” tab on the Mac to insert a header (or footer).

(images below show MS Word 2010 for PC and MS Word 2011 for Mac)

On a PC, mak­ing a header and insert­ing a “Quick Part” are both ele­ments under the “Insert” menu on the rib­bon. Under “Quick­Parts,” select “Field.”

On a Mac, you insert a Header using “Doc­u­ment Elements”

Step 2

The “Quick Parts” icon on a PC will offer you the option to insert a field. The field value for “cur­rent page”  on a PC is “Page.” On the Mac, open the  “Insert” menu and select “Field.”

The cor­rect field for the “cur­rent” page on a PC is “Page.” Select the for­mat you want — I selected Ara­bic numerals.

On a Mac, “Field” is an option under the “Insert Tab.”

Once you click on the “Field” option on a Mac, select the “Num­ber­ing” cat­e­gory, and use the “Page” field to insert the cur­rent page number

Step 3

The Field for the total pages in doc­u­ment on a PC is “NumPage” or “Sec­tion­Pages” on a Mac.

The “NumPages” field will track the total num­ber of pages in a doc­u­ment on a PC.

On a Mac, the field that tracks the total num­ber of pages is “SectionPages.”

Step 4

Insert the date (PC and Mac) by going to “Date and Time” on the “Insert” tab. Pick the for­mat you want, and make sure the “Auto Update” fea­ture is enabled.

On both PC and Mac (Mac shown) “Date and Time” is pretty straight­for­ward to include in your header. Just make sure the field auto-updates.

Step 5

The final header! Blue high­lighted text is what I typed man­u­ally. The grey high­lights are fields, and are auto-generated and auto-updated when you open your doc­u­ment. Hov­er­ing over the fields gives you the option to update.