Fields In MacWord

Article contributed by Daiya Mitchell

For a nice general overview of fields in Word, see here.

Word’s fields depend heavily on the F9 key. However, in Mac OS X, the system has commandeered the F9 key for Exposé. As a result, it can be a little annoying to deal with fields, and Word Help in Office 2004 only gives mouse commands, not keyboard shortcuts, for commands that would usually involve F9.

You can get around this. You can reset Exposé in System Preferences to use a different set of keys, hot corners, or mouse-click commands. Or you can dig the Word commands out of Tools>Customize (look under “All Commands”), and put them on a toolbar or assign a different keyboard shortcut. You can also access many commands by right-clicking or control-clicking on a field.

Note one difference between WinWord and MacWord: In MacWord, F9 updates all fields, including those in the header and footer. Although right-click Update Field (cmd-shift-option-U) appears to offer to only update one field, it updates them all. In WinWord, F9 only updates selected fields, or the field with the cursor in it, and will not update fields in the header/footer unless the cursor is there.

Action

Name Under “All Commands”

Mac Keys

Win Keys

Update fields

UpdateFields

F9

Select all, then F9

Type field braces

InsertFieldChars

cmd-F9

Control-F9

Show all field codes

ViewFieldCodes

Option-F9

Alt-F9

Show code for selected field

ToggleFieldDisplay

Shift-F9

Shift-F9

Stop selected field from updating temporarily

LockFields

cmd-F11

Shift-F9

Let selected field update again

UnlockFields

cmd-shift-F11

Control-shift-F11

Convert selected field to plain text

UnlinkFields

cmd-shift-F9

Control-shift-F9