I have been tasked with updating a Word 2010 fillable form for one of our departments. In various places in the form it uses a drop-down box with the same 20-or-so items in the list. I would like to make it so all occurrences of this box fill from a master list, thus making it easier to update in the future. I know in Excel you can do this with Data Validation and selecting a source list from somewhere else in the workbook. Is it possible to do something similar (reference a table, hidden text, etc) in Word? I have not been able to locate a feature in Word that looks promising, nor have my Google searches yielded anything useful. I realize this would probably work in VBA, but I'm hoping to avoid adding code to the workbook if possible. I would also prefer that the list be updateable by someone who does not know VBA. I'm not looking to do the impossible, so if you know for a fact that this cannot be done, say so and I'll move on.
Thanks.
Related
I'm developing an add-in for MSWord using Microsoft web add-in API. I'd like to underline or highlight some given words, but only in the scope of that session. I don't want to change the document's state. In other words, I don't want to persist the new text formatting when the document is saved.
I know how to format text, but the document's state is changed. I have this code at the moment:
word_range.font.underline = Word.UnderlineType.wave;
I want to achieve a behavior similar to Grammarly plug-in, where the underline is only to point out something is wrong with those words, but again, without persisting the underlining.
I found a similar question (word - highlight search results without permanently changing document formatting), but it was asked a few years ago and the solution is not exactly what I'm looking for.
I'm afraid that there is no way to highlight that will automatically disappear if the user saves the document. The answer that you linked to, or this one is the best that can be done in Office.js right now. It is a good idea, however, so please suggest it at Office Developer Suggestion Box.
Using a VBA form, is it possible to add a Listbox control that has columns which contain Combo box controls?
No not possible with Standard VBA; Standard VBA will not allow this! You may be able to create a custom ActivX control or load another 3rd party control as suggested elsewhere but a standard ListBox cannot hold a ComboBox.
Other Workarounds may be usable if you can provide more details...
If you insist in doing that using User Forms, the only way is that when you click a list item, it should pop a different form containing the combo box, it will be too much work to create and difficult to maintain.
I am sure with spreadsheet itself you can come up with better solutions. I am still not sure what ultimately you want to achieve, but to me this is just a dependent list so you can use sth like this in the spreadsheet itself:
http://www.contextures.com/xlDataVal02.html
I'm looking at Word as part of a document generation solution for a law firm. There are different documents that need to show/hide certain clauses/sections based on business rules and logic that can be fairly in depth - things like a specific judge in a specific county requiring certain information, so entire sections of the document may be shown or hidden based on this logic.
I'm aware of the Content Controls in Word, but is it possible to have nested content controls inside each other? For example, let's say I have a dynamic paragraph (i.e. it might be shown or hidden based on some business rule) and that paragraph also needs to display the name of the plaintiff, which is retrieved from a database.
Our current solution uses a pseudo templating language inside of the Word docs that gets parsed out and replaced (something like {FIELD "FIELD_NAME"} which would insert the value of FIELD_NAME) and it seems to work fairly well but I'm curious if it couldn't be improved using built-in features of Word instead of custom software.
Is something like this possible? I've found an article for Word that seems to indicate this exact scenario, but no articles or resources explaining how to actually achieve it.
Sure, you can nest other content controls within a rich text content control.
You can do this programmatically (in Word using VBA, or in a VSTO Add-In).
But first just try it in Word (enable the Developer ribbon, then insert a rich text control, then insert other content controls in that). A rich text content control can contain paragraphs, tables etc (provided that it is block level, not run level).
I've recently started using filemaker to create some contact databases. I played around with one of the templates and after having tweaked the template to a point where its got all the data I need on it, I've found that I messed some things up in the process.
All the things listed below seem to have been affected.
'View Contact List Report' no longer works
'View Address Labels' no longer works
(Both show a prompt saying "no matching records were found")
the avery label printer doesn't show anything more than the name of each record.
(NB: All of these were working fine with the standard untouched template)
I'm guessing that because I altered the names of the fields, their corresponding scripts, calculations are no longer valid..
Where do I go to fix these scripts/calculations/etc (i.e. replace old field names with new ones..) is there any way I can edit the current ones or have a shot myself in the foot?
It sounds like you deleted some fields. If you simply renamed fields then the scripts should still work, unless you changed the data around drastically (perhaps the script is doing a find on a field that should contain some specific type which is no longer set in the field...) Go to layout mode, find out what script the button is calling and then open the script and re-set any set field steps that are calling missing fields and you should be good to go.
FileMaker doesn't normally rely on names, so users are free to rename everything. It's possible to write code that does depend on names, but it must be an explicit decision and I'm not really sure they did this in templates.
But who knows; to check this figure out which scripts run these reports. To do this switch to the layout mode and double click the buttons (or right-click and select "Button" from the context menu). Open scripts, find the script there, and see if it does anything suspicious.
my company's software product has a feature that allows users to generate forms from Word templates. The program auto fills some fields from the SQL database and the user can fill in other data that they desire. So we have a .dotx template that holds the design of the form, and then the user gets the .docx file to fill out when they call it from our program.
The problem we're having is that some of our users have been finding that the forms take an exceptionally long time to open up and then, once open, are so slow to respond (scroll around, etc) that they're unusable. So in my investigations so far, I've found out that the problem systems are one with lower powered CPUs (unfortunately it happens for systems above our system requirements) and the Word forms that cause the problems are ones with large amount of ActiveX style checkboxes on them. I verified that reducing the ActiveX checkboxes fixes the form loading problems.
So I have the following questions about solutions (we're using Word 2007):
1) Is there any way to configure Word, or some other settings, so that there won't be such a strain opening a Word form with lots of ActiveX checkboxes? Any way of speeding up Word's opening?
2) Using Legacy style checkboxes instead of the ActiveX ones makes the forms load fine, but it looks like the user has to double-click the checkbox and change Default Value->Checked. Is there a way to configure it so that they can simply click on the checkbox to tick it? "Legacy Forms" checkbox as a name kind of worries me (Legacy…), does that mean a future version of word at some point wouldn't load the checkboxes because they're "legacy"?
3) Yes, it became clear to me after a little bit of research into solutions that Word is not the tool for the job for forms like I'm describing. InfoPath seems to be exactly what we should have been using all along but unfortunately I wasn't involved in the decision making or development of these forms, just tasked with coming up with a solution.
I'd appreciate answers to any of these, or if anyone has any other ideas for solutions to this problem.
Thanks
I'm about 3 years too late, but if you want a legacy checkbox to act like a checkbox, you have to restrict editing on the document or section. (You can lock just a section, if you want.) Locking--on Word 2010 it's called "Restrict editing"--is an option under either the Developer tab or the Review tab.
If you restrict editing in this way, the user cannot edit the text but can fill in the form field, so if the form field is a checkbox, the user can click the checkbox on or off; if the form field is a text box, the user can fill the text box.
If you choose to lock off just a section, you'll probably want to use continuous section breaks (Page Layout > Breaks > Continuous) and specify which section. (In the space where you choose form editing as your kind of restriction, there's a small link that lets you specify which section or sections are locked.)