I've put together a protected form in Word that, once completed, the user will submit by email. Ideally the email would contain the form pasted into the body of the email rather than as an attachment, but as the form is protected there's no way the user can unprotect the document, "select all", copy and re-protect the document.



So I have provided two options for the user: 1) a Submit button at the end of the form which fires up a blank email with the completed form as an attachment (via the SendMail command). 2) A "copy to clipboard" button which copies the entire Word doc content to the clipboard without the need for the user to unlock and re-lock the document. The user can then manually paste that content into the body of the outgoing email.

This work fine up to a point: when the email is sent to a recipient, controls such as radio buttons and dropdowns won't display for the recipient. All other parts of the form including text fields display as intended.

As a workaround I want to add additional text fields beneath any radio button groups and dropdown lists. I would like these text fields to reflect the selections made using the associated controls. i.e. if the user chooses "No" from a Yes/No radio button group, then the text field beneath that group will populate with the text "No" (because I know that field text will display in the recipient's email even if the actual radio/list control doesn't). The same goes for dropdown lists; whatever the user selects from the list should display in the text field next to the list.

Is there a way/piece of VBA code that will allow a control to "export" its value to a text field?

The two control types I am using are radio buttons groups (Yes/No) and dropdown lists. The rest of the form contains text fields (which work fine).

Thanks.

I assume by protected form you are talking about a protected form using legacy form fields?

Legacy form fields are not compatible with radio buttons, though you can emulate them with check boxes and macro code; however macros required to make a form work should not be used in e-mailed documents as they tend to fall foul of security arrangements and you have no ability to force users to run them as that would open the window to malicious code.

I would also recommend that you don't copy the form to the body of the e-mail message. For one thing it won't work as you have found and for another, you have no control over the e-mail client that the recipient uses and not all behave similarly.

Furthermore, collating data from e-mail messages is rather more complicated than doing so from Word documents, so you are just making the job more difficult for yourself.

I would recommend that you convert the form to use content controls. To aid that you may find http://www.gmayor.com/insert_content_control_addin.htm useful, and send the form, without macros as an attachment.

Content controls are much faster to process than form fields (especially with Word 2010 which is up to 6 times faster than later versions). You can have the form protected - the above link explains more - or you can just protect the fields. There is no radio button control, but you can use list boxes to achieve the same end.

http://www.gmayor.com/ExtractDataFromForms.htm will help with the data extraction.

Have you considered making the form as a web page on the company web site and providing a link to it?

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Graham Mayor - MS MVP (Word) (2002-2019)
Visit my web site for more programming tips and ready made processes www.gmayor.com