From my experience working in WordPerfect/Word for over 25 years, most people
I have spoken too have a great dislike for protected forms. I worked in
WordPerfect for 5 years (20 years ago) and have now been working in Word for
15 years and, as much as I LOVE word, I HATE the fact that Word does not give
the option of locking cells in their tables and only allows us to use form
fields which requires us to protect the form to use it. I have annually sent
an email to Microsoft over the last 15 years requesting that they offer their
users the options of locking cells. They still have not. I can't tell you
how many happy customers they would have if they would just offer that
feature.

Our company of 5,000 people have to use approximately 100 forms that have
been created with form protection and it stops the users from doing a bunch
of different things (can't edit headers/footers anywhere in the document,
when a company form is updated they can't unlock their old form to make a
change or they'll lose their information in the field cells once it is locked
back up --- BIG PROBLEM, can't insert the locked form into another document,
etc.).

All in all, I have not heard one good thing about using forms versus simply
having a form in a table where the cells are blocked. Changes to the forms
could be made so much easier.

Someone in Microsoft please take the hint!!! I love your software and can't
say enough about it except for this one major issue that has been haunting
our company employees for the last 15 years every since we moved to Microsoft
Word.


--
Debra Ann


"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:

This is exactly what forms protection does. It prevents entry of text in any
part of the document (including tables) that is not a form field. See
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customizat...nTheBlanks.htm and especially
the forms tutorials by Dian Chapman that this article links to.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
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"jjjdel" wrote in message
...
Suggest you create a way to lock a cell in a table so it cannot be typed
in
until unlocked. This is helpful for use in forms that use tables. When
moving
from cell to cell using the tab key, locked cells should be simply
bypassed
and the cursor should land in the next unlocked cell. Locked cells can
contain instructions or other matter that does not need to be changed. It
would be helpful to have an option to unlock all locked cells in an entire
table for ease in editing. After editing, the same cells can be easly
relocked.

This feature is available in WordPerfect and its absence is one source of
my
frustration with Word.