A Fast Way to Add Boilerplate to a Document

Q. I often have to add large blocks of boilerplate to current documents. I have the boilerplate saved in separate documents, and while it’s not very hard to open them, copy the material and then paste it into my current document, I’m sure there is a faster way.

A. Your instinct is correct—there is, and it involves creating fields and using the IncludeText function.

Set up each boilerplate file with a descriptive name that is easy to remember because you don’t want to waste time looking it up every time you want to use it.

When you come to the place in your document where you want to add the boilerplate, insert a pair of field braces { } by pressing Ctrl+F9. Then, within the field braces type IncludeText followed by a space and the full path name of the boilerplate document. So, if you named the boilerplate file c:contractsXY contract.doc , the formula is {IncludeText “c:contractsXY contract.doc”}.

However, if both the file you want to add the boilerplate to and the boilerplate itself are in the same folder (subdirectory), you can simply call it XY contract , omitting the full path. Now press F9 to update the field, and the boilerplate will pop into the document, replacing the formula.