MS Word Legal template - autopopulate fields

[Tomb50]

I have a legal template in Word that is used quite often. I have many blanks to fill in multiple times depending on the individual case. For example, I have to enter the Plaintiff's Name in 13 different locations, the Plaintiff's address in 4 different locations, the court case number in 5 locations, etc. In all, I have 12 different fields that I have to populate multiple times through the legal form.

I'd like to automate this in some way so I don't have to type in each field multiple times.

I'm hoping that I can have another template where I enter all the different fields one time and maybe click a button to update each field on the legal form based on what I typed in.

Anyone have any ideas? Thanks

 

[SkipVought]

Hi,

One approch might be to use MailMerge.

Enter all the data items ONE TIME in the source table.

Insert the Merge fields in the appropriate places in your document.

In the MailMerge toolbar, toggle the View Merged Data button. Use the Next Record & Previous Record buttons to navigate the source data.

Note that you do not actually merge all the records. Rather you VIEW them in your document one at a time, as required.

Skip,

_{Did you hear what happened when the OO programmer lost his library?...
He's now living in OBJECT poverty!}

 

[fumei]

Also check out: Repeating data

This is a common issue, and can be solved fairly easily.

faq219-2884

Gerry
My paintings and sculpture

 

[mintjulep]

Fields. SET, FILLIN and REF fields.

The nested field codes:

{SET thing1 {FILLIN "What is Thing1?"}}

Will bring up a dialog box asking you "What is Thing1?". Whatever you enter will be stored in a bookmark named thing1.

Wherever you want thing1 to appear in the document, add a REF field.

{REF thing1}

 

[macropod]

Hi mintjulep,

That would be more easily done with an ASK field:
{ASK Thing1 "What is Thing1?"}

Cheers

[MS MVP - Word]

 

[mintjulep]

Macropod,

Yes, you are correct.

I've used SET and FILLIN where I needed to append a "constant" to what was entered into the fillin.

{SET thing2 "Some stuff" {FILLIN "What is thing2?"}"}

 

[macropod]

Hi mintjulep,

I don't quite understand why you'd need the constant to be included in the bookmark - I'd have thought you'd have any constants in the body of the document. Also, you can achieve something like that by inserting a default value in the ASK field, giving the user the option to edit, replace or add to it:
{ASK Thing1 "What is Thing1?" \d "Some stuff"}

Cheers

[MS MVP - Word]

 

[mintjulep]

I wanted to add a constant because later I assigned thing2 to be the document title.

{TITLE {thing2}}

The "constant" was a letter type, and what the user entered in the dialog was a letter number. The concatenation of the two made a unique name.

There are probably better ways. It worked at the time.