Hi,

I got a assignment at work to help a department with one of their forms.

They use a special form to update the condition of a patient each time the
patient has visited them. Unfortunately this is not done in a database etc.,
instead they have pre-printed paper that has 3 columns: date, signature, text.

Up until today each time the patient comes in they take out his/hers paper
and use a typewriter to add new text to the paper. Each time they write on
the paper they move a few lines down from the last entry and add date,
signature and then text.

They now wanted a way to use word for entering the text into these forms.

My first solution:
I created a Word-page with a 3 column table which matched the layout of the
paper exactly. The table-borders were 'invisible' when printed out but
visible on the screen. This meant they would on-screen see the paper and that
it still printed out ok when printed out to the pre-printed paper. Each
column was made up by 1 'tall' cell (I set the height of the cells to the
correct height for the paper).

Since they do not want to save anything on the computer the document was a
template. Each time they opened it up it was empty. They then checked the
paper to see how far down they had to start to type in Word (so that they
wouldn't print out on top of a earlier text) and then simply used the "Enter
key" to move down each column until they found the spot where they would
start typing.

The problem with this was that it mean that they had to press "enter"
several times for each column to have them start typing on the same line.
They felt it was a bit to much work.

So they wanted a similar solution where they can place the cursor anywhere
in each column and start typing right away.

I've tried several other solutions:

Instead of 3 columns with just one tall cell in each column I made the table
with 1 cell/line (you could call it a normal table). This method makes it
easy to start typing right away on whatever line you want but the problem is
that when you type the text in the third column, instead of the text continue
to flow to the next line it just increases the height of the current cell and
screws up the layout of the table since it now flows over to a new page ...

I've also tried to use text-fields to flow text but it didn't work
expecially well.

I'm a webdeveloper and not a Word wizard so I'm a bit lost here. if you
had a similar assigment, how would you solve it?

They just want to be able to load up the template of the page, put the
cursor at the right place in the first column and start typuign in date, tab
to next column and end up on the same line, write date, tab to the next
column and then start typing text. Nothing more complex ...

I appreciate any ideas. Maybe I shouldn't use tables at all? Or maybe some
macro would be useful ..?

Thanks in advance!

Björn