I love SharePoint. The constant “Gee, I didn’t know you could do that” moments that only come at 2AM in the morning.

This one is compliments of a Demo preparation, one question in the demo script in particular asks about document policies. So I open it up and make sure the Disposal Policy is set for the demo… then I have a look at the other ones, and the “Label” one catches my eye.

I recently had a client come and ask me if they could embed the current version number of the document in the document footer so that when they printed it, everyone would know which version they were looking at. I said at the time that it would require a small amount of development (which was correct if you are stuck using Office 2003 like they are) – but if you have the unadulterated joy of ribbonly goodness that is in Office 2007, then Oh! Happy Days! - you can just add a label from the Information policy and make sure that it includes the variable placeholder {Version}.

Then you open the document, insert the Label QuickPart and save.

When you re-open the document, voila! The footer contains your version number! Thanks Brian for your detailed guide - http://bryansgeekspeak.blogspot.com/2009/03/moss-2007-show-sharepoint-version.html – which my cloudy brain needed to make this work (I never closed and reopened the document – Just thought it would pick up the version number immediately).

Naturally, this is more effective when you have versioning switched on – so remember to enable it on the document library. And if this is something you want to have in all documents, make a mandatory site policy that is applied across all Document Libraries.

Bedtime…

B