I dumped 2007 and went back to 2003. The crazy paving they used to replace the drop-down/fly-outs was too weird for me. Design for design’s sake. Ms has run out of ideas.

Insert | Footer | Edit Footer
Insert | Quick Parts | Field…
Categories = “Document Information”
Field Name = “FileName”
Field Options: “Add path to filename” - Check
OK

That’s it. It’s not difficult and it has hardly changed since Word 97.

If you WANT TO, you can select the newly inserted field and save it to the footer gallery so you can use it again quickly. Select the text, format it how you want, then:
Insert | Footer | Save Selection to Footer Gallery…

This is the new bit in Word 2007 and what the building blocks template you found is trying to do for you.

Now when you go to Insert | Footer you should see your own footer offered. You can create these building blocks from anything and add them to virtually any gallery. Make your own cover pages, headers, footer, textboxes, equations, boilerplate text, etc. All very useful and easy to use.

Simon Jones
Contributing Editor
PC Pro Magazine

Thanks for that Simon, that is an easier way than I found! Although it was much easier in 2003 as we had Autotext

But after I add the filepath to a footer in 2007, it doesn’t update when I move the file. How do I get it to do this? It did it automatically in 2003.

Hello,
I am teaching Office 2007 online. One of my students inserted the filepath which shows correctly in the normal view; however, when I switch to print preview the footer shows the correct file path as well as the temp file path. This only shows in print preview -in normal view, the footer is correct.
I download the student submittals to my PC from the CMS.

It seemed much more difficult to me to insert the file path than in older Word versions. That’s why I’m here:-) What tripped me up was selecting “field” in the quick parts section. I assumed that meant a blank field. Inserting the file path in the footer is very common, and the way to do it seems hidden in Word 2007. Many of the people I work with complain that they can’t find commands easily in 2007.

It is unreal how bad MS did on the whole Office 2007 suite. what used to take literally 1 second can take up to an hour to find out how to do it. In past releases everything was still pretty much where one would think. In my opinion MS has FAILUED MISERABLY!!!

Thanks for the tip, great blog!

Thanks for the filename tip..it was of great help..:)

The new Office 2007 ribbon drives me around the bend…I used to consider myself an advanced user, and could do things very quickly…now it takes a long time to find things…and still doesn’t make much sense. Spending too much time searching for what used to be a simple operation.
That’s my 2 cents.

So, why did I even have to look this up in the first place?… First impressions of office 2007 — MS is the new US Auto Industry - totally missing the point, on the way to extinction. Office 2007 is the new full-sized SUV. It scares me to think how much $$ went into developing Office 07 while at the same time it seems to have made things more difficult (ie. everything takes twice as many mouse clicks now..). Mostly it just looks like they’ve moved stuff around so they’d have an excuse to hit up customers again with new fees. I’ve yet to see a significant change. Outlook, excel, etc.. Ok — the translator might be cool, but what else? …