After reading my column about adding file path information into a Word footer, an astute reader named Sherman pointed out another method of inserting the information. His technique works in Word 97 and later. My approach was to just add a field manually using the Insert|Field command. If you hate the idea of fields, you can shield yourself from that technology by using the Insert Auto Text button instead. To add the pathname this way, follow these steps.
1. Choose View|Header and Footer
2. Click the Switch Between Header and Footer button on the Header and Footer toolbar to switch to the footer.
3. Once your cursor is sitting in the footer, click the “Insert AutoText” button on the Header and Footer toolbar. A pop-up menu appears with a number of choices, including “File name and path.”
4. After you choose it from the list, the filename appears in the footer.
You also can choose to add other information such as the author name or “page X of Y” automatically. However, in this situation it helps to understand what Word is actually doing. I’ve talked about AutoText in this column before. Basically, it lets you save a block of text with a name. That text can include fields. So when you are inserting the “canned” text using the Insert AutoText button, behind the scenes, Word is still using fields. And as I discussed in another column the NumPages field is broken in certain versions of Word 2000. So the AutoText based on that field is equally broken.
So in certain versions of Word 2000, because of the broken field, when you print your pages, instead of getting “page x of y” Word prints 1 of 1, 2 of 2, 3 of 3 and so on.