Ask fields in Word 2000 (not merged document)

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I am struggling to get an ASK field to work in a Word 2000 document. I write
regular reports, not using mail merge. I am currently using fill-in fields
without difficulty, but need the same information in the document several
times - the subject's name, then "his" or "her" for example. I can't get the
correlation between the ASK field and the bookmark right. Can it be done?
Apologies if this is very basic.
 
Suzanne - where are you? I see replies to other people, but not to me - am I
in the worng place? But when I was looking at other threads I saw an
irritated message from you to someone who had posted the same message twice.
Clearly a dreadful sin. What shall I do?
 
If I knew anything about ASK fields, I would reply, but I don't.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
 
Hi Julia,

The syntax of an ASK field is only slightly different from a FILLIN field,
but the results are quite different.

In A FILLIN field, you might have:
{FILLIN "My Prompt}
and, immediately you type in your response, the result is displayed.

In an ASK field, you might have:
{ASK BkMrk "My Prompt}
and, immediately you type in your response, the result is bookmarked but not
displayed. In this example, the bookmark's name is 'BkMrk'.

To display the results of an ASK field, you need to use a REF field, eg:
{REF BkMrk} or simply {BkMrk}

So, to get an ASK filed to display it's result you might use:
{ASK BkMrk "My Prompt}{BkMrk}
but that still won't display the result until the REF field is updated. To
force that to happen, you could use:
{QUOTE{ASK BkMrk "My Prompt}{BkMrk}}

The other problem you'll run into is that the REF fields will display an
error message if you don't run the ASK field at least once, or manually
insert an empty 'BkMrk' bookmark.

Be aware too that, when you've got multiple REF fields all drawing from the
same bookmark, only the one wrapped inside the same QUOTE field as the ASK
field (see last example) will automatically update to reflect your response.
To get all of them to update, you'll need to select the whole document
(Ctrl-A) and press F9, or print the document with the 'update fields' option
checked (Tools|Options|Print).

Given those limitations, you might consider using Formfields instead, in a
protected section of your document, to solicit the required responses.
Formfields can have a 'calculate on exit' attribute set, and this will
immediately update any dependent REF field references.

Cheers
 
Hi Julia,
I am struggling to get an ASK field to work in a Word 2000 document. I write
regular reports, not using mail merge. I am currently using fill-in fields
without difficulty, but need the same information in the document several
times - the subject's name, then "his" or "her" for example. I can't get the
correlation between the ASK field and the bookmark right. Can it be done?
Click to expand...
I'm not quite sure I understand what the problem is. Does it have to do with
displaying the ASK field content, explicitly, in more than one location? Which
version of Word do you have?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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