Stop Forms from growing

[Steven]

I am using Word 2003 and I have a question regarding the objects on the
FORMS toolbar. I have a Text Form Field embedded inside a Frame on a word
doc I created. The problem is, when the user types in the text field and
hits carriage control for many lines of text, the Text Field and the Frame
object will grow and overlap other forms on the document.

How do I stop the forms objects from growing? Limiting the text to a
certain amount of character doesn't help, the user can just hit ENTER 10
times and make the form grow.

Thanks in advance.

Steve

 

[Jay Freedman]

There isn't any really good answer for this problem. The workaround is to
use a table (instead of the frame) with its row height set to an Exact
measurement. This still doesn't prevent the user from hitting Enter lots of
times, but the extra lines won't be visible or change the position of
anything on the page.

However, the paragraph marks will be in the field data if you export that to
a database or use it for something else, so you'd have to pre-process it to
strip off the extra paragraphs.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Steven]

OK, thanks.
Steve

There isn't any really good answer for this problem. The workaround is to
use a table (instead of the frame) with its row height set to an Exact
measurement. This still doesn't prevent the user from hitting Enter lots
of
times, but the extra lines won't be visible or change the position of
anything on the page.

However, the paragraph marks will be in the field data if you export that
to
a database or use it for something else, so you'd have to pre-process it
to
strip off the extra paragraphs.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup
so
all may benefit.

 

[Charles Kenyon]

Tables work better than frames for this purpose. You can change the Enter
key's action to be that of the Tab key.
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q187/9/85.ASP What you are
talking about is what Word calls an "online form." For more about online
forms, follow the links at
http://addbalance.com/word/wordwebresources.htm#Forms or
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/FillinTheBlanks.htm especially Dian
Chapman's series of articles. You may also want to look at
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/TblsFldsFms/LinesInForms.htm.

Hope this helps,
--

Charles Kenyon

Word New User FAQ & Web Directory: http://addbalance.com/word

Intermediate User's Guide to Microsoft Word (supplemented version of
Microsoft's Legal Users' Guide) http://addbalance.com/usersguide




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