Populate fields in multiple documents (2003)

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One of our users wants to automatically populate fields in several documents from one document. She is our HR adminstrator, and she said there are sometimes up to 15 documents that new hires have to fill out when they are hired. She said it would be much easier if she (the HRA) could type the new hire’s information into one document (such as name, address, phone, SSN, hire date) and have those fields populated in the other documents.

My first thought was to use a REF code, but I don’t know how to use that across documents. Any ideas? Thanks for your help.

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One way is to use formfields in a document protected for forms, and to assign meaningful bookmark names to the formfields you want to refer to.
In another document, click where you want the reference.
Press Ctrl+F9 to insert field braces { } (don’t type the braces yourself).
Make the field look like this:

{ LINK Word.Document.8 "F:FormsMaster.doc" "LastName" a t }

Press F9 to hide the field code and update the result.

LINK is the name of the field that provides a link to text in another document.
Word.Document.8 means that you link to a Word document.
“F:FormsMaster.doc” is the document you refer to, all backslashes in the path have been doubled.
“LastName” is the name of the bookmark you refer to.
a means that the field will be updated automatically.
t means that the link is inserted as plain text.

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Maybe Mail Merge could handle this.

It’s been a while since I’ve set one up, but, as I recall, fields in various documents can be instantly auto-populated with information that has been entered into a table in a separate source document. The source document table could be updated for the current new hire info.

Maybe the individual docs could even be combined into one large doc, and all populated at one time.

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