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Hello All,

I am trying to create an electronic form using Word 2003. I have
created a table with four columns and two rows. It looks like this:

Request Number: ___________ Request Date: ___________
Requested By: ___________ Team Name: ___________

Since I cannot draw the table just consider the underscores to be the
second and forth columns (they are not there in my document).

Since I only want people to fill in the areas where the underscores
are, I opened the Form toolbar and inserted a "Text Form Field" into
that area. By default it creates the Text Form Field about the width
of one tab length. I also have border shading turned on so to the
person filling the form out it appears like they can click anywhere in
column two or four to enter the information (and of course that is not
the case).

The form works well if you are tabbing through and filling out the
information. If the "Requestor" is too long it will wrap within the
column and that is exactly what I want it to do. The problem is if I
want to use the mouse to click directly in the area next to "Requestor"
I have to make sure I click in the small area where the text form field
is. If I click slightly to the right of that field it tries to tab to
the "Team" entry area.

What I am trying to accomplish is to set columns two and four to be
"Text Form Fields". If someone clicks in the area next to "Request
Number" and enters a single character I don't want word to
automatically readjust the Text Form Field size to 1 character. This
causes big problems if someone wants to click back and edit the field.
They would have to click directly on the single character because the
rest of the area is now uneditable whitespace.

Some things I have tried:

Attempt: Insert 4 or 5 Text Form Fields in each editable column
Problem: This looks good but when you tab through the form you have to
tab through each section. It also (of course) considers each of these
as separate text fields and creates whitespace after you enter all of
the information in the first one.

Attempt 2: I tried to see if I could "Merge" these fields into one Text
field.
Problem: Word won't let you do this.

Attempt 3: I defaulted to a bunch of spaces to make the width the
entire size of the table column.
Problem: When they edit this field it will either shrink the field down
as soon as they start typing which causes problems if you want to mouse
click the area and edit later. It may also leave the spaces and
therefore create a row-wrap of whitespace.

This is driving me crazy. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Ryan