Auto-updating year in Word

Did you know that we can add a year formula in Word which will auto-update whenever we go to print? Needless to say, this is quite a handy thing if we are creating annual documents for repeated use... such as course documents.

While Word kindly provides the options of many date formats, the standard format of year alone is not presently an option in the Word Date and Time options (Insert ribbon | Text | Date & Time). It is always a nuisance to have to go into every document header and manually update the date - and usually I only remember to do this when I realise myself that I haven't done it... which is often after a course has started.

This is something that I have always wanted to automate, and I finally found how to recently. We enter the following script from Robbins (2015) into our header, where we want the date to appear, then key Ctrl & F9 (and double-check we have our F Lock on!):

CREATEDATE \@ "yyyy"

Once we key Ctrl and F9, our date code will get some curly brackets around it to show that the field delimiters have been inserted, like so:

{ CREATEDATE \@ "yyyy" }

If we now go to print preview, we will see that this entry has now become the current year. All we need do is to remember how to write and activate this function, and we are good to go :-)

Sam

Reference:

Robbins, D. (9 September 2015). automatically update year in Word templates. Microsoft Support. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/automatically-update-year-in-word-templates/a936d4c2-d63f-4c12-8714-d275283bdaec