Why F9?

[Walter Briscoe]

I failed to find anything on this via groups.google.com.
I use Word 2003 SP1 on Windows XP Professional SP2

A field in Word is created by using Ctrl+F9 and inserting field code
into the brace pair {} which shows that Ctrl+F9 has been done. (There
are other methods which are equivalent.)

Alt+F9 toggles between displaying the field code in braces and
displaying the value of the field.

A field in Word is evaluated with F9 when the field is selected.

If the code in the field is changed, the code and the value remain
inconsistent until F9 is applied. This seems to contradict the notion of
WYSIWYG. What merit does it have? (The only advantage I can see is one
of speed in opening a document.)

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

It updates the result of fields to ensure that WYSIWYG. The act of changing
the field code does not do that.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

I thought Walter was asking why it should be necessary to press F9. Why
doesn't the field update the moment that field results are toggled on?

I have to says that I tend to agree--there have been few times (but there
have been some) over the years when I didn't want them to update. But, my
preference would be to have a universal setting "Automatically update" (that
actually works, so that the {date} field in a document would not update when
the file is opened, that would let fields behave precisely as Walter's
question implicitly suggests.

And... in Word 2007, I'd like to have a Ctrl+F9 option that acts ONLY on
fields, and not on other links. I lost a few well-crafted charts before I
realized what was happening. Now, to update only fields, I find that it's
easier to temporarily convert a document to compatibility mode, update
fields, and then return it to Word 2007 format.

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

Hi Herb,

I guess in the last paragraph you meant Alt+F9, not Ctrl+F9.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Actually, I meant F9. <sigh>

--
Herb Tyson MS MVP
Author of the Word 2007 Bible
Blog: http://word2007bible.herbtyson.com
Web: http://www.herbtyson.com

Hi Herb,

I guess in the last paragraph you meant Alt+F9, not Ctrl+F9.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP

 

[Peter Jamieson]

This seems to contradict the notion of WYSIWYG.

It does.

What merit does it have? (The only advantage I can see is one of speed in
opening a document.)

It's just a guess, but performance is probably the original reason why many
field code types do not update automatically. Updating a whole bunch of SEQ
fields in a document could take quite a long time on a typical system
running something like Word 2. A few years ago field behaviour was modified
to reduce the amount of auto-updating because of potential security hazards
to do with including information from other files.

If fields were all "standalone", performance might not be an issue with
modern machines - for example, Word 2007's "Content controls" offer
"instantaneous" update of the content when the underlying data in the data
store changes. However, fields can be used in lots of different ways.
Suppose you have a bookmark called x, and { REF x } field that is embedded
inside multiple INCLUDETEXT fields. The user adds a character to the
bookmark x. Should all the INCLUDETEXTs update their contents immediately?
That may not be such a good idea (OK, so the notion of including lots of
files based on the content of a bookmark may not be such a great idea
either, but a software manufacturer designing a platform has to aim to make
that platform perform in a reasonably graceful way whatever a user does). Or
suppose you are adding { TC } entries throughout your document - each time
the ToC grows over another page boundary, you may have a substantial
repagination, which can also be a timeconsuming operation that leaves the
user "at sea". Perhaps it's better to let the user enter lots of TC entries
then update the ToC.

There are other issues, but I suspect they are minor compared to security
and performance.