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Inserting Document Properties

As you create a document and throughout its life cycle much information about the document is tracked and stored in the PolicyTech database. You can access this information and have it appear within the content of the Microsoft^® Word or Excel^® document itself by inserting what are called property fields. For example, you could insert property fields to show the name of the document owner, the date the document is approved, and names of the departments the document affects. The contents of these fields automatically change as events occur that affect those document properties.

The instructions below explain how to insert a property field into a document. For details on each document property, see Appendix: Document Property Details.

Inserting Into a Word Document

While editing a Word document, place your cursor where you want the property field inserted, and then do one of the following:

If your screen looks like the one below, click Tools, click Insert Properties, and then navigate to and click the information you want to insert.

If your screen looks like one of those below, expand the Insert Properties menu in the PolicyTech Tools panel, expand a property type heading, and then click a property.

Some fields that are inserted will immediately display the correct value, such as the document title, the document owner's name, or the current date. Other fields display the correct information only after certain events have occurred. For example, if you insert the Publication Date field, you will see Not Approved Yet as the field text until the document is approved, at which time the approval date will appear. Also keep in mind that some of a document's properties, such as its title or assigned approvers, are editable. If a property is changed in the Properties Wizard or in System Settings, that change will automatically be reflected in the corresponding inserted property field.

Inserting Into an Excel Document

While editing an Excel document, select the empty cell where you want the property field inserted, and then do one of the following:

Important: A property field cannot be inserted into a spreadsheet cell that already contains information or that is being edited. Make sure that the cell you select is empty and that you are not in edit mode (that the cursor is not active in the Formula Bar or inside the cell).

If your screen looks like the one of those below, click Tools, click Insert Properties, and then navigate to and click the information you want to insert.

If your screen looks like one of those below, expand the Insert Properties menu in the PolicyTech Tools panel, expand a property type heading, and then click a property.

If you see the prompt, Warning: Using this feature with Excel will erase your undo history, do one of the following:

Click OK to erase the undo history and continue to insert the field.
Click Cancel to go back to editing the document without inserting the field.

Important: You will see the warning only once during an editing session, but inserting a field always erases the undo history. To avoid erasing information from the undo history that you might need later, we suggest you insert fields either as the first or last step of creating an Excel document.

When you insert a field into a Microsoft Excel document, it looks like normal text, but it is not. You can identify a document property field in Excel by clicking on a cell and then looking in the Formula Bar, or by double-clicking a cell to activate edit mode. A property field contains the following formula: =[field_name], where [field_name] is the name PolicyTech has assigned to this document property (rv_all_users_full_name in the example below). Because an inserted property field contains a formula, you cannot edit the property field text in an Excel document.