Inserting a File Name without an Extension

You can use the FILENAME field to insert the current document's file name in your document. The exact way you use this field is described in other issues of WordTips. You can use field switches to specify whether you want the field results to include the full path for the file, or not. One thing you cannot specify, however, is whether you want the results to exclude the file extension.

One way you can control this is by configuring Windows to either display or hide filename extensions. You do that within Windows by following the steps on this page:

http://windows.tips.net/T012372

This approach works great as long as the documents are being viewed on your system. If the document is opened on someone else's system, then the FILENAME field will display the file extension according to the configuration of Windows that they have set up; this may be a drawback.

Another way to insert the file name without the extension is to use a different field. For instance, you could use File Properties to save the filename by typing it in manually without the extension. You could then use the DOCPROPERTY field to recall that specific property and insert it in your document. Other WordTips describe how to create and use document properties.

If you need to insert a static copy of the document name quite often, the best way to do it is with a macro. Consider the following single-line macro:

Sub InsertFileName()
    Selection.InsertBefore Text:=Left(ActiveDocument.Name, _
      Len(ActiveDocument.Name) - 5)
End Sub

Run this macro, and the name of your document (without the file extension) is inserted before whatever is selected in your document. The macro examines the document name, and then strips the last five characters (the period and file extension) from the name.

This approach works well for four-character file extensions, such as DOCX. If your files have a different number of characters in the file extension, you'll need to either change the code to strip off the correct number of characters or change it to automatically recognize how many characters there are in the extension.

Using the macro approach is very easy, but it isn't dynamic. This means that if the document name is changed, then the text in the document still reflects the old document name, not the new one. The way around that is to simply run the macro again to insert the new document name at whatever point you want it to appear.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (8558) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Inserting a File Name without an Extension.