Remember when we used the properties view in the My Computer window and we saw all that information about a file? Let’s take a look again; you can see the file properties circled in the sample below:

Where does it get that file information? Believe it or not, that information is stored in your document! (You may have heard about politicians embarrassed by hidden information in their Word documents; this is where people found that information.)

To view the properties for your document, click the File menu and click Properties.

This first tab (General) cannot be edited. It tells you the type, location, and size of your document. It also gives you the MS-DOS name of the file; when it was created, modified, and last accessed; and shows you its Windows attributes (Read-only, Archive, Hidden or System).

The next tab, Summary, is editable. This window will show you the title, subject, author, manager, company, category, keywords, comments, and hyperlink base for your document. Most of these will not be filled in by default; title will be filled in after you have saved your document, and author and company will be filled in according to the information you provided when you installed Office. You can click in any of the white text boxes and add, change, or delete information.

At the bottom of this window, the Template field tells you what template was used to create the file. As well, you can check Save Preview Picture if you want to be able to preview your document when using Thumbnail view.

The third tab, Statistics, contains statistics about your document. These are automatically filled in by Word and cannot be edited. It will tell you when it was created, last modified, last accessed, and last printed. It will also display who edited it last, how long they worked on it for, and what revision number it is. A count of various elements (words, pages, paragraphs, characters, etc.) will also be displayed.

Tab number four shows you your document’s title or the first line of text. This tab will only contain information if you have already saved the file.

The last tab is Custom. You can use this tab to add a variety of custom properties to your document. First, type in its name or select a name from the scrolling menu. Then, choose the type (Text, Date, Number, or Yes or No). Finally, type in the value for that property. Then click Add! Your property will display in the bottom portion of the screen. This can be an easy, consistent way to track facts about a document, such as who it was checked by, which office it belongs to, or which typist created it.

Once you’ve modified your file’s properties, click OK. (Of course, you can also click Cancel to discard your changes.) You can go back into your file properties and make necessary changes at any time; remember that fields like title will change automatically if you save the document with a different name.