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ellen ellen is offline
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Default Form attachment in outlook - fields lose values

Thank you Cindy. I'm passing this onto the person who reported the issue. -
Ellen

"Cindy M." wrote:

Hi ?B?RWxsZW4=?=,

Word form with check boxes, when sent as an attachment in Outlook 2003 and
opened from Outlook, loses the selections. If you detach the form and open
it in word 2003, the check boxes are correct.

In testing this, it seems that if you use a mouse with the scroll button
after opening the attached form, scrolling through the form also causes the
selections to change. If saved and opened in word, using the scroll button
does not cause any changes to the form.

Is there a way to prevent the form from losing the selected check boxes?

Not if it's being opened in Outlook. Outlook doesn't support Word's binary
file format, only HTML. And form fields don't "translate" to HTML; nor is the
document protection active. It's this combination that's causing the behavior
you describe.

One possibility would be to not use checkbox form fields. Instead, use a
macrobutton with a pair of checkbox symbols (unchecked and checked) - this is
what Microsoft uses in the Fax templates that have been part of every version
of Word from 6.0 through 2003. The macro swaps symbols. The symbols will
probably appear correctly in Outlook and certainly be immune to scrolling. But
the macros will not function viewing the document in Outlook, and they could
cause problems with macro security and anti-virus software.

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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