You can relock an old form after making a change. In Word 2003 just use the
lock button on the toolbar. In earlier versions it takes a macro. You can
also make your tabular form in Excel and apply its much more complex
protection scheme. Then, if needed, you can import a portion of the Excel
worksheet into a Word document, retaining the Excel features. (Of course
this requires both the software and hardware to run both programs at the
same time.)

What you are talking about is what Word calls an "online form." There are
work-arounds for most of the problems you cite. For more about online forms,
follow the links at http://addbalance.com/word/wordwebresources.htm#Forms or
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customizat...nTheBlanks.htm especially Dian
Chapman's series of articles. You may also want to look at
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/TblsFl...nesInForms.htm. These include
links to instructions on relocking a form retaining data.

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

See also the MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/ which is awesome!
--------- --------- --------- --------- --------- ---------
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from my ignorance and your wisdom.

"Debra Ann" wrote in message
...
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
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup
so
all may benefit.

"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.