[Sondra]

My company has several documents which are shared nationwide. The national
office develops the document and then we have to fill in the blanks. I want
to create prompts for my users so that they can fill in the required fields
and not destroy the integrity of the fields.

I want to use fill-in or Ask Fields, but I get the impression these can only
be used with mailvmerge.

I also tried Macrobutton nomacro and that didn't work for this purpose either.

Can anyone offer some advise.

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

FILLIN and ASK fields can certainly be used without a mail merge. Have you
read the Help topics on these fields?

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"Sondra" wrote in message
...
My company has several documents which are shared nationwide. The
national
office develops the document and then we have to fill in the blanks. I
want
to create prompts for my users so that they can fill in the required
fields
and not destroy the integrity of the fields.

I want to use fill-in or Ask Fields, but I get the impression these can
only
be used with mailvmerge.

I also tried Macrobutton nomacro and that didn't work for this purpose
either.

Can anyone offer some advise.

[Jay Freedman]

Hi Sondra,

Although the Help gives the impression that Ask and Fill-In fields are only
for mail merge, and that is what they were originally intended for, it's not
true that they can't be used without mail merge. When you use them in an
ordinary document, though, they have some behavior that makes them
thoroughly annoying.

The most annoying is that they pop up their prompts every time the fields
are updated. That's what you want when you first create the document. But if
you have the "Update fields" option checked in Tools Options Print, then
every time you print the document all the prompts will pop up again. You'd
have to instruct each recipient to turn off that option to avoid being
pestered to death.

That brings us to the second annoyance: When the prompt appears, the current
value of the field is selected, so you can replace it by just starting to
type. But if you want to keep the current value and just hit OK, you have to
remember _not_ to hit the Enter key -- that won't activate the OK button,
but instead will erase the current value! If you have the presence of mind
to click the Cancel button you can restore the current value, but it's a
good recipe for losing data.

After the first time you enter a value in the field, you can lock the field
by selecting it and pressing Ctrl+F11 (it can be unlocked by pressing
Ctrl+Shift+F11) so it won't prompt again. But nobody remembers that -- I
always have to look it up, because I use it so infrequently.

If you could distribute templates instead of documents, you could develop a
userform (a macro-driven custom dialog) that gathers all the data for the
current document and puts it in the proper places. If you don't have the
time and expertise to do that yourself, look at DataPrompter
(http://www.wordsite.com/products/dpdas.htm).

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

Sondra wrote:
My company has several documents which are shared nationwide. The
national office develops the document and then we have to fill in the
blanks. I want to create prompts for my users so that they can fill
in the required fields and not destroy the integrity of the fields.

I want to use fill-in or Ask Fields, but I get the impression these
can only be used with mailvmerge.

I also tried Macrobutton nomacro and that didn't work for this
purpose either.

Can anyone offer some advise.