Why not stash the codes in document variables? They are accessible only from
VBA, which is perfect if your codes aren't intended for human consumption
anyway.




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Can anyone think of a good way to hide some text without using the
hidden text font? I also don't want to use a macro solution, for
reasons I care not to get into right now. The text in question can be
in a table cell, but I don't really want it to take up space -- or at
least not much -- no matter how much text is there.

The best way I've come up with so far is to put the text into a text
box and set the height and width to zero. That works, but it becomes
tricky to find the blasted thing afterwards. One way to find it later
is to apply a particular style to the text before shrinking the text
box, and then do a find for text of that style after it's been
shrunken. At least then you can spot the handles of the text box so
you can temporarily resize it to a reasonable size to work with, and
then reshrink it again when you're finished. That might be OK if I
can't find another technique that would be easier to maintain.

Why in the world am I doing this? I'm creating a template for a group
of people that I work with. The text box will contain field codes for
setting document properties, and I don't want people seeing or messing
with them. Without a protected document, I realize that this isn't
entirely risk free, but if I stash the text box away in a table cell
that people normally shouldn't be messing with, this shouldn't be an
issue.

Why not just use the hidden text font? I might actually just end up
using that. However, I kind of had plans to use hidden text font for
imbedding instructions to the user of the template (with the option for
viewing hidden text turned on, but the option for printing hidden text
turned of, of course). I could also use the comment feature for user
instructions, but Word's comment presentation options are less than
ideal for this purpose, and I also wouldn't want my comments to
interfere with any comments that the user might decide to use.

This isn't a burning issue for me, but I figured someone else might
have other clever ideas. I'm using Word 2003, by the way.