Footer - different text on different pages in a section

[Sandy]

I am using Word 2003 creating a procedure manual that has multiple sections
in the document. I am updating the manual and only a limited number of pages
in each section will be revised. What I want to do is change the revision
date on the pages that only contain revisions, leaving the original date on
the remaining pages in 5 different sections of the manual. For instance,
page 2 the revision date is November 16, 2007 and page 3 the revision date
needs to stay at the former revision date of October 6, 2006. Is this
possible to do within a section?

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

There are a couple of approaches, and it depends on how fine-grained
your changes are. Do you need to change the date per page, per topic of
the manual, or per chapter of the manual? (By the way, page is not
really a good concept to use here, unless you have a single topic per
page--I'm sure you are updating topics, rather than pages)

1) Section breaks
In order to manually edit a footer for a document longer than three
pages, you pretty much need to have section breaks. You can set the
footer per-section, not per page. If you want to say that Chapter 3 was
revised one date, but Chapter 2 at a different date, section breaks
between Chapters would be a fine way to do this--a new chapter probably
starts on a new page anyhow, regardless. But section breaks between
pages is a bad idea, because even if you match a manual section break to
the place where Word puts an automatic page break now, eventually it
will change and drive you crazy.

2) StyleRef Fields
Okay, let's say the manual is divided into chapters and subsections. If
you make a notation as you revise each subsection, in the text itself,
like so:
2.4 Widgets
(revised 15 November 2007)
2.5 Gadgets
(revised 1 November 2007)
Then you could use a StyleRef field to pick up the nearest revision date
and copy it to the footer, without needing section breaks at all.

See here for information on StyleRef fields:
http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/StyleRef.htm