Word Autodate

[Tyler Robbins]

We are processing Word documents that contain the {Date} function. This
translates to the date of the system and automatically updates when a
document is opened or printed. We would like to be able to automatically
print such documents and 1) not have the date automatically update, or 2)
change the date to a specified date.

Currently the strategy is to change the system clock, but that hinders us
because we can't do keep legitimate system statistics, as the system time
keeps changing. Is there any way to retain the original date or
programmatically set that date without affecting the entire system clock?

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?VHlsZXIgUm9iYmlucw==?=,

There's really no good solution for this, once the documents are created. I
advise you to change the templates being used to create such documents to
contain the CREATEDATE or PRINTDATE or SAVEDATE field, rather than a DATE
field. This should at least alleviate the problem for the future.

As to the documents that already exist, if they're in a state where they're
updating when you open them, you can do nothing to prevent this. Without
knowing the version of Word you need to work with, it's difficult to make a
wide range of suggestions. For all versions of Word, you could

Use Insert/File and insert the document into a new document, displayed in
the Normal view. The DATE field should not update, in this case. However,
it's not said that the document will appear or print exactly the same as the
original.

We are processing Word documents that contain the {Date} function. This
translates to the date of the system and automatically updates when a
document is opened or printed. We would like to be able to automatically
print such documents and 1) not have the date automatically update, or 2)
change the date to a specified date.

Currently the strategy is to change the system clock, but that hinders us
because we can't do keep legitimate system statistics, as the system time
keeps changing. Is there any way to retain the original date or
programmatically set that date without affecting the entire system clock?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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