[donna]

I had developed an Invoice Form in Word 2003. It allowed me to go into a
contact in Outlook, use the mail merge feature there, and select an existing
document (i.e., the generic invoice form) and then generate an invoice
pre-filled with the client address information. Then the form automatically
filled in a date field, and allowed me to enter some data such as "work
performed", "hours", "rate discount", etc. and then it calculated the various
sub-totals (e.g., parts and labor) and then computed the final totals. It
worked great. I turned on protection to fill in the form and let it calculate
the results.

Now I have "upgraded" to Word 2007 and I am ready to tear my hair out!
Outlook still allows me to merge a contact into my old invoice form, but then
the trouble begins. If I protect the form, none of the legacy fields can be
filled in. It only recognizes fields added with the new 2007 field formats.
Also, before, when I opened up the newly created document after clicking
"Okay" in Outlook to perform the merge, the resulting document had already
been "merged" and it was ready for me to click "protect" and then enter new
data and have it automatically calculate. Now it opens a document that has a
button that says "complete merge." If I do so, I lose all aspects of the
"form" fields.

In essence, BEFORE I had a nice solution that allowed Mail Merge and Forms
to work perfectly together. Now, instead of what was once simple elegance to
create form fields, when you click on field properties in Word 2007, it opens
up a Visual Basic scripting tool!! That is not user-friendly! Although the
"legacy" fields still exist, they do not work as they once did, namely the
protect feature does not recognize them as legitimate fields to be filled
out. And there is no equivalent of the simple-to-use "calculated" field,
rather there is a complex scripting language (VBS) to be dealt with.

Perhaps I am missing something... even though I have struggled with every
combo I can think of to make it work in the new version of Word!! If anyone
else has experienced any similar trials with converting their old 2003
functioning forms into Word 2007, I would be most grateful to hear how you
made it work! THANKS!