You're not doing much wrong as such: what you are seeing is the field codes
rather than the results of the fields. You can change this to always view
the results by going to Tools, Options, View tab and clearing the checkbox
against View Field Codes.

--
Terry Farrell - Word MVP
http://word.mvps.org/

wrote in message
...
Hello Suzanne

I realise that I am looking very stupid in public but I have had no
success. Everything you have said in this and earlier posts makes good
sense but the result is never what I'm looking for.

In this instance, having read your htm file, I have clicked Filenew.
This has opened a new blank page with the assistant to the left. I
click on "templates in my computer" and it obligingly lists the
entries from my templates folder in my data partition.

I choose letters.dot and position the curser where I want the date. I
click InsertCreatedate and choose the format and it produces this:

{CREATEDATE \@ "dd MMMM yyyy"\* MERGEFORMAT}


I know that this computes as 29 October 2006 but this doesn't appear
in the document even after I have saved it, closed it, and re-opened
it. It always appears as this code.

To be honest, neither did it look like this code in my old template.
It always appeared as a date.

What can I be doing wrong.

Colin


On Sun, 29 Oct 2006 11:00:34 -0600, "Suzanne S. Barnhill"
wrote:

The best sort of date field to insert in a template is CreateDate. This
will
always reflect the creation date of the template in the template but will
update to the creation date of the document in each new document based on
the template. It will never update afterward. See
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/TblsFldsFms/DateFields.htm