In KWord1.x a variable inserted via the 'insert->variable' menu when found in the text was shown with a special outline or something. This is great feedback for the structure of the document. It would be nice if KWord2 got this feature back.
Thank you for your bug report or feature suggestion. The "KOffice" application suite is no longer maintained, and all tickets are now closed. We recommend to switch to the "Calligra" application suite, which has replacements for all unmaintained KOffice applications: - KWord was replaced with Calligra Words - KPlato was replaced with Calligra Plan For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligra_Suite (This is an automatic message from the KDE bug triaging team)