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One of our PCs is not printing footers with field codes; it is printing the field codes rather than the field results. For instance, one of the items in the footer is using the "Page X of Y" deal.

It shows up correctly in the document itself as "Page 1 of 3" but in the print preview and the printed copy it shows up as "Page {PAGE} of {NUMPAGES}." Same goes for filenames, etc.

I tried pressing [Alt]+[F9] to toggle between field code view and field result view and it changes it back and forth in the document itself and also in the print preview, but even when I print from the print preview that displays correctly it still gives the bad version.

I think it's got to be something with this PC or this installation of Office, because the same documents print fine from other PCs.

How do I fix this?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by nfj628

Dani AI

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Good sleuthing, . The behaviour you saw is common: Word has separate controls for on‑screen field display and for what actually goes to the printer. That explains why the footer looked fine in the editor/preview but printed as raw codes on that machine — the print-time setting that controls field output was different on that PC.

Extra checks and troubleshooting that complement the KB fix:

  • Verify the print-only field-code option in Word Options (modern builds put it under Advanced > Print). Also enable the option to update fields before printing so totals refresh.
  • Inspect individual fields with Shift+F9; use Ctrl+F11 to lock a field and Ctrl+Shift+F11 to unlock one. Locked fields will not update when printing.
  • Print to a different device (Microsoft Print to PDF or another physical printer) to rule out a printer driver issue.
  • Run Word in Safe Mode (hold Ctrl while launching it or start winword.exe /safe) to rule out add-ins that might flip options.
  • If the setting seems to revert, change it while only one Word window is open, save and restart Word. If it still won’t stick, test under a different Windows user account on the same PC to see if the problem is per‑user.

If those steps fail, back up and rename Normal.dotm to force a clean global template, or run an Office repair. Because the option is stored per user/machine, the KB solution that found resolves most cases; the extra checks above help isolate driver, add‑in, profile, or template causes when it does not.

Member Avatar for donaldw

It took a bit of searching and figuring out which keywords to search on, but I finally found a solution in the .

I'll just leave this here a tutorial for posterity.

  1. On the File menu, click Print.
  2. Click Options, click to clear the Field codes check box under Include with document.
  3. Click OK, and then click Close.
  4. On the File menu, click Print Preview to verify that Word displays the field code results.
Member Avatar for nfj628

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Edited by nfj628 because: n/a
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