Special Characters in Fields

When you are using fields in your documents, you may have a need to include the quote mark and the backslash in the field definition. Unfortunately, these characters have special meaning, and may not be interpreted the way you intend. Consider, for example, the following field:

{ QUOTE "You should use "Y" or "N" in your response" }

When you use this, you get exactly what you expect: a full phrase (including quote marks) in the field result. Consider the following example, however:

{ FILLIN "You should use "Y" or "N" in your response" }

When this field result is displayed, you see an input box. However, the entire prompt does not appear. You only see the text "You should use " in the input box. Similar problems are manifested when you try to use backslashes with some fields.

To get around the problem, you need to get in the habit of using a backslash before any quote or backslash you want included in the field, as in the following:

{ FILLIN "You should use \"Y\" or \"N\" in your response" }

This approach informs Word that you want the quote marks (or backslashes, if you use \\) displayed as literal characters.