How to protect section of a table

[Guest]

I'm trying to design a form, in table format, with some pretyped text in one
area and allow the user to enter text in the other column/row.

Is there a way to protect the text that is pretyped so the user can not
change it and get the curse not to stop in that area when the TAB key is
pressed?

 

[Jay Freedman]

I'm trying to design a form, in table format, with some pretyped text
in one area and allow the user to enter text in the other column/row.

Is there a way to protect the text that is pretyped so the user can
not change it and get the curse not to stop in that area when the TAB
key is pressed?

Hi Greg,

Read this article:

Please Fill Out This Form
Part 1: Create professional looking forms in Word
http://www.computorcompanion.com/LPMArticle.asp?ID=22

 

[Guest]

Do you know if this will allow a picture to be shown on the form and then a
text box over the picture?
Thanks,

 

[Jay Freedman]

If the picture is something you put there while you're designing the form
and it doesn't change, you can format the picture as "behind text". It won't
interact with the form's text fields.

If what you have in mind is that the user chooses a picture to insert into
the form, that's really hard to do because there is no such thing as a
"picture form field". It would take macro programming.

 

[Guest]

Another question. Is there a way to preset the text field to a particular
size?

The picture I had asked about would be a picture preset within the form, so
it sounds like it may work.

Thanks,

 

[Jay Freedman]

Hi Greg,

Again it depends on what you're trying to achieve.

If you turn on nonprinting characters with the ¶ button, you'll see that the
default content of an "empty" ttext form field is five nonbreaking spaces
(which are shown by small circles). If what you want is simply to make that
bigger, you can enter more nonbreaking spaces (Ctrl+Shift+spacebar) in the
Default box in the field's Properties box. As soon as the user types
something in the field, though, it will collapse to the size of the entered
text.

If what you want is a fixed size that the user can't alter, the answer isn't
so nice. The best you can do is to set the table cell containing the field
to a fixed column width and row height, and turn off table autoformatting.

 

[Guest]

How do you turn on nonprinting characters? Also, is there a way to hide the
lines of a table so they do not show within Word?

Thanks for all your help!

 

[Jay Freedman]

Answers here:

http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/NonPrintChars.htm
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/TblsFldsFms/Gridlines.htm

If you want the lines to be invisible regardless of whether the person
viewing the document has gridlines enabled, use the Format > Borders &
Shading dialog to turn on all the borders and color them white, same as the
background.