Editing portions of text in a form field

[Guest]

I have created a form with drop downs/ tick boxes etc.. and some areas to
fill in text. My colleagues are compaining that when they need to edit text
in this field they are unable to select just a few words to delete/ overwrite.

Is there any way of making a text field easy to edit?

 

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?R2FieQ==?=,

I have created a form with drop downs/ tick boxes etc.. and some areas to
fill in text. My colleagues are compaining that when they need to edit text
in this field they are unable to select just a few words to delete/ overwrite.

Is there any way of making a text field easy to edit?

If the form fields are in a table, then the answer is NO. There's a
long-standing bug in Word that won't allow you to select text "properly" in the
form field. You'd have to either
- rebuild the form using Frames instead of a table
- create a macro that will let the user work with the text in a UserForm
(dialog box)
- use ActiveX controls (from the controls toolbox) instead of form fields.
But these have other limitations (trigger macro security and don't conform to
the document's text flow, for example).

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

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[hartmanj]

I started looking at this newsgroup last night because of that same complaint by our users. To expand upon it, I noticed that it only happens when the text fields are inside a table cell. I can select one word by double clicking, otherwise it selects the entire contents of the field to either side of the cursor, whichever way you drag. When the field is not inside a table, any portion can be selected. Using tables provides other beneficial structure, so I'm hoping to be able to get around this...