It is common practice to insert the date and/or time in your document’s header or footer. When you do this, the date is printed on every page of your document. To insert the date, you can follow these steps if you are using Word 2019 or Word in Office 365:
Follow the steps below to learn how:
- Click the Insert tab of your Ribbon.
- In the Header & Footer group, click either Header or Footer, depending on which one you would like to edit.
A list of options will display what you can select from. - Select either the Edit Header or Edit Footer option. Word will activate the header or footer area of your page, depending on your choice.
- Place your cursor within the header or footer at the place you would like the date to appear.
- Be certain the Header & Footer tab of your Ribbon is displayed.
- Select a date format from those on the left-hand side of the dialog box. Word inserts today’s date.
- Click OK.
- On the right side of the Header & Footer tab, click Close Header and Footer.
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Looks like step #6 is missing from the description and I suspect that’s the step where the list of date options is made to appear.
(Ed note: Thanks, Patrick. I fixed the error.)
See Carol’s response below…
But I still don’t see the step that says how to bring up the date dialog box.
Funny, I thought I used to use that feature in an old (CPM and DOS) program, ‘WordStar’. Is MS Office finally catching up?
You can also triple click in your header area to open it and then click Insert, | Field (found under Quick Parts) and select Date. Hopefully that answers the question of how to open the Date dialog.
I used to experience problems with auto-date insert feature (header/ footer, or w/i body of text) in the older Office/Word versions. Over the decades, I trained myself to never use this feature because if it is NOT set correctly, each re-opening (or re-saving) of the document also updates the date field.
Over these same decades, I have also trained myself to use the Date format as YYYY/MM/DD, which should be the (global) ISO standard for entering numerical date everywhere.