IF Statement "Placeholders" Disappear when Merge Codes Turned On

[paul.hobin]

I created a merge main document with a number of tables optionally inserted
using IF statements. I hid the merge codes (using Alt-F9), thus hiding the
tables, and forwarded the document to another employee for editing. I didn't
know the other employee knew very little about merge. Not seeing the tables
they added them to the document again.

When the document came back to me I found that the extra tables are visible
with merge codes hidden, but hidden when merge codes are visible. I
interpret this as meaning Word considers the extra tables to be within the
"IF" merge code. I've called them "placeholders" because their behaviour
gives the appearance of such functionality: a block of text which appears
when merge codes are hidden to show the user where a merge code is in the
document, but is not the block of text inserted by either the True or False
parts of the IF statement. For example a placeholder might contain the text,
"A User Settings table is inserted here when documents are merged, if a
Desktop or Notebook is being replaced."

I'm speculating about these "placeholders". I've never seen this
functionality documented. Is this behaviour supposed to happen? Is it an
intended functionality as I've described? Is there documentation of it
somewhere on Microsoft's sites?

 

[Peter Jamieson]

Yes, if you insert text in the result of the field, that text will not
be displayed when you display the field code.

I don't think I have seen this specially documented anywhere, but I
would tend to avoid it because such content can disappear very easily
indeed - e.g. even if you save and re-open the document, whatever the
user inserted may dsappear for good, probably dependin gon the field
being used, the version of Word, possibly various options in Word and so on.

Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk