How to Display the Date a Word 2013 Document is Printed

Word 2010 For Dummies

One of the date fields you can use in Word 2013 is PrintDate. This field reflects the current date (and time, if you like) that a document is printed. This may be a good idea for business documents, or any other purpose where you need the date recorded on the document. Here’s how it’s done:

Summon the Field dialog box by selecting Field from the Quick Parts drop-down in the Text group of the Insert tab.

The field dialog box will appear. Look for the Categories drop-down list.

Select Date and Time from the Categories drop-down list.

Use the mouse to select the Date and Time Category from the drip-down list.

Select PrintDate from the Field Names list.

Once you have located the Field Names list, choose PrintDate.

Choose a date-and-time format from the Field Properties area.

Choose the format that best suits your document.

Click OK.

The field looks gross until you print the document, which makes sense.

It’s a good idea to put the PrintDate field into the header of important documents, which lets people know the date the thing was printed. PrintDate works well for that purpose; the other fields in the Date and Time category are updated only when you manually refresh them.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.