Weekly Computer Tip # 363
2 March 2012


Mark your out-of-date documents as "superseded" or "outdated"
(Word 2003-2010)

During an Advanced Word course at the University of London earlier this week one of the PhD students said he saves the various versions of his thesis as PDF to protect himself from editing an outdated version by mistake. (Bonus tip: press F12 and select PDF from the drop-down list.) At this point I told the group about how to add your own "watermark" behind the text, in order to easily identify the document's status. So prevent yourself from working on old versions by marking them as OUTDATED or SUPERSEDED.

Here's how:

  1. Click on the Watermark button in the Page background group on the Page Layout tab of the document.
  2. Click on Custom Watermark at the bottom of the gallery.
  3. Click on the Text watermark radio button.
  4. In the Text box, (over)type the text you want to appear (such as OUTDATED or SUPERSEDED).
  5. If preferred, specify other options, such as the font, font size, font colour and layout.
  6. Click the OK button.

If you are still using version 2003, have a look at tip_314.php.

By the way, specialising in training people how to best share and manage information using content management tools I'm obviously aware that the days of struggling to find the most up-to-date version are over, but my brief that day was to help the delegates to use Word to its full capacity. And that's what they learned.

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