Many businesses rely on the use of fields within their Word documents.  These fields often point to references within the document or file and path names for where a document is located (typically on a mapped drive on a fileserver), or a Table of Contents (TOC).

To update all fields within Word 2003, change to Normal view, select all (Ctrl A), then press F9.  If you don’t change to Normal view first, then fields that are contained in a header or footer are not updated.  (Ask Microsoft.)

This doesn’t work in Word 2007.  There is no Normal view.  However, even changing to the equivalent Draft view, selecting all and pressing F9 still only updates fields within the body of the document.  It won’t update fields that exist in the header or footer.

To update the field codes in the header and footer in Word 2007, click on the Office Button, select Print, then Print Preview.  You will then see that any field codes contained in the header and footer will be updated.