[Form Lady]

I have a "form" which is a contract and is a mail merge document. I have
password protected this "form" to allow other parties only to merge, not edit
the text, but once it is merged into a new document, the contract is no
longer protected. Is there a way for me to protect this "new merged"
document from the person who merged it from making changes to the text other
than the merging of the fields?

Also, when you password protect a form document allowing only for
highlighted fields to be changed, can you set it up so it cannot be saved
over, only saved as?

Thank you

[Cindy M.]

Hi ?B?Rm9ybSBMYWR5?=,

I have a "form" which is a contract and is a mail merge document. I have
password protected this "form" to allow other parties only to merge, not edit
the text, but once it is merged into a new document, the contract is no
longer protected. Is there a way for me to protect this "new merged"
document from the person who merged it from making changes to the text other
than the merging of the fields?

No. The two concepts don't function together. It's either protection OR merge,
you can't have both. A macro could do some of it for you, but it wouldn't be
reliable. For this level of security, you'd need a "real program" such as a form
to get required user input (whatever is used now to get the data being merged).
Then code combines this data with the basic document and applies protection
before the user ever gets the document.

But please note that Word protection isn't that secure. For all but one kind,
Insert/File will circumvent any protection you can apply (see below).

Also, when you password protect a form document allowing only for
highlighted fields to be changed, can you set it up so it cannot be saved
over, only saved as?

I believe this is only possible with IRM (Rights Management) protection. And for
that you'd need a Windows 2003 server to do the managing.

Word probably isn't the right tool for what you have in mind. Adobe might be the
better bet if you're looking for something "off the shelf".

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 17 2005)
http://www.word.mvps.org

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