Placeholder text as a prompt in a field in a protected form (without programming

[Danny McNamara]

I wish to create a protected form for others to use as a
template when creating documents. The final documents will
be used largely on paper.

The documents will contain legal/contractual material and
I wish to prevent users from editing this. For this reason
I want to create a protected form, allowing users to enter
text in form fields only.

I want to display some prompt (or 'placeholder' text) such
as 'Type your name here' in the fields. I want this to
disappear automatically from any given field when the user
moves the cursor to that field.

Finally, I'd like to do this as a regular Word user with
no programming knowledge/experience.

Note: I am able to achieve the desired results in an
unprotected form by inserting a 'NoMacro' MACROBUTTON
field. The trick is to achieve the same in a protected
form.

Regards,

Danny

 

[Greg Maxey]

Danny,

Why don't you simply assign default text to the formfield
(e.g., Type your name here). Double click the formfield
and define the defualt text.

 

[Danny McNamara]

Greg,

Thanks for the suggestion. The trouble is that default
text doesn't disappear automatically when the user enters
a field. The user has either to delete the default text or
overtype it.

Regards,

Danny

 

[Graham Mayor]

That's the point of default text. The alternative is to put in help text
which will appear in the status bar at the bottom of the screen. If your
users are completely clueless you could add an autonew macro to pop up a
message box pointing the users to the status bar messages - but that would
need a bit of programming eg

Sub AutoNew()
MsgBox "Refer to the status bar for field completion instructions"
End Sub

Save this in the form document template - not in normal.dot.
See http://www.gmayor.com/installing_macro.htm
--
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>>< ><<>
Graham Mayor - Word MVP

Web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site www.mvps.org/word
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>>< ><<>

 

[Greg Maxey]

Danny,

That seems like a reasonable choice

All I can suggest is to run a macro on entry similiar to:

Sub EnterText1()
ActiveDocument.FormFields("Text1").Result = ""
End Sub

Greg

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

If they tab into a field the default text will be selected, and anything
they type will overwrite it (assuming they have "Typing replaces selection"
enabled). If they click into it with the mouse, then they're not using the
form as intended.

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

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