Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Learn When to Use the Ask Field Over the Fill-in Field in Microsoft Word 2003

The Ask and Fill-in fields are two of the most useful fields that you can use in the Microsoft Word arsenal however these fields are also two of the most misunderstood fields as well. These two fields will help you in developing templates that your team can use, which will prompt them to enter data into a Microsoft Word template based on preset questions you have chosen to use. However, be warned that the two fields play a very different role and choosing the right field can save a lot of pain in the future.

Both field types are designed to ask you a question in a template when you create a new document or if you activate the field. For example, if you were in a sales team, you may know that a certain type of letter will achieve the best results. Rather than your staff creating their own sales letter, you can setup your sales letter as a template that asks the team member when using your letter to enter a name and address. To achieve this you could simply insert the Ask and Fill-in fields.

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You can insert each of these fields into your template by simply visiting the Insert menu and then choosing Field from the drop down menu. The next step is to then choose the category you require, which in our case is the Mail Merge category and then simply choose the field you require and press the OK button.

The question now begs which field do I use. Well here is the simple answer. Both fields ask you a question; however the Fill-in field automatically inserts the answer you type into the field where as the Ask field actually stores the answer in a bookmark. The advantage of using the Ask field is that you can have the user enter the information once into a template, like say for instance, a persons name and then use the REF command through out the template to access the information entered.

The key advantage of using the Ask command over the Fill-in command is that you only ask the question once and then reuse the information as many times as you require through the document. This is a huge time saver and makes the Ask field a very valuable tool.

Learn When to Use the Ask Field Over the Fill-in Field in Microsoft Word 2003

Chris Le Roy has a number of tools available to help you in being more effective in using the Microsoft Office suite. He has a range of Microsoft Office cheat sheets to help you learn your Microsoft Office shortcuts more effectively. You can find a Microsoft Word Shortcuts cheat sheet, a Microsoft Excel Shortcuts cheat sheet and Microsoft PowerPoint Shortcuts cheat sheet on his website.

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