Understanding the COMPARE Field

One of the fields that Word makes available for automating your documents is the COMPARE field. Most people don't use this field that much because it can be confusing to do so. The entire purpose of the COMPARE field is to do exactly what it says--compare values. All you need to do is provide the two values (along with the comparison operator), and COMPARE will return either a 1 if the comparison is true or a 0 if it is false.

For example, let's say you wanted to compare the contents of a bookmark to see if it was equal to a specific value. If your bookmark name is MyBook, the following COMPARE field will do the trick:

{ COMPARE { MyBook } = "TestText" )

If the bookmark (MyBook) is equal to TestText, then the COMPARE field returns a value of 1 (True). If it is not, then COMPARE returns a value of 0 (False).

As you might imagine, returning a zero or a one, by itself, may not be that valuable of a feature. Where COMPARE comes in handiest is when you use it as an argument for one of the other comparison fields. For instance, you might use COMPARE in conjunction with the IF field to specify conditional text for your document. When used in this way, the value of COMPARE is limited only by your imagination.