“Many OpenOffice.org users have a love-hate relationship with
fields. On the one hand, they hardly can avoid using them. Items
such as page numbers and bullet lists use fields automatically to
eliminate corruption while editing. On the other hand, fields can
be difficult to grasp. More than one new user has been alarmed by
the gray backgrounds used by default to display fields in Writer
and needed to be reassured that the backgrounds don’t print. More
experienced users may be nervous because fields are associated with
difficult concepts, such as conditions, data sources and mail
merges. And this nervousness is not reduced by the help system,
which often fails to explain these concepts at a beginner’s
level…”