Heavily customising Word with a template

[Guest]

Hi all,

I have a client who asked me for a corporate Word template, and now is
expanding this request to include customising Word so that anything not
explicitly included in the template is inaccessible to the user.

Well, clearly the user will be able to open and close Word documents, but
they want (by way of examples) to prevent the user from accessing ANY
paragraph styles other than a defined list, or to prevent them from
italicising text if the standard style is not italics. This approach to be
carried through every toolbar and menu in the application.

I think I can see my way to doing each of these things, but the whole idea
gives me a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach. I am worried that removing
as much as this may make the application unusable in the sense that a
perfectly normal workflow or usage scenario may become impossible. I have a
horrible feeling this will never end and I will be tweaking the template from
now to kingdom come.

Does anyone have any experience of locking down accessible functionality
this much? Does this sound like a Good Idea, or should I be trying my hardest
to convince them out of it? Is Microsoft Word designed to be emasculated in
this way?

Any ideas, advice, or experience gratefully received!!

Regards,

Julian

 

[Helmut Weber]

Hi Julian,

it depends on the backing You get from Your client.

With the arrival of VBA, I changed Word's appearance to an amount,
that most users didn't recognize it as Word anymore.
I removed a lot of buttons from commandbars
and put the commandbars to the left and right of the screen,
where they are located best anyway. Lot's of commands are intercepted.
More, e.g. on "save", on "save as" and on "print", I do a check for
unwanted formatting and reset it to standards.

Of course, some slightly advanced users, those who know,
that it is still Word, complain, that the ruler isn't there anymore,
that the undo-button has gone, that they can't save
a document, as long as there is a table in it,
that all is different from what they got at home.

Then, if Your client doesn't support You by
"take it or leave", You are at a loss.
Otherwise, You've won.

--
Greetings from Bavaria, Germany

Helmut Weber, MVP WordVBA

Win XP, Office 2003
"red.sys" & Chr$(64) & "t-online.de"

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

If you are using Word 2003, you can limit users to specific styles, and you
can certainly customize toolbars and menus to remove unneeded buttons and
commands. As long as the changes you contemplate are made in document
templates and not in Normal.dot, I don't see any objection to them.

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

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