Hi,


I have a lot of VBA experience, but not much with Word. I'm hoping some of you can answer my questions. I'm trying to build an attractive form in Word that can be emailed to customers. Currently my client is using Excel, but they want something prettier.

The customers would select a product from a dropdown list of 40 products (with descriptions of up to 140 characters). They fill in two number fields, and a cost is calculated automatically.

I've tried using a content dropdown list without VBA, but there seems to be a restriction to 25 items on the list and maybe 75 characters? Would ActiveX controls give me more flexibility?

Finally, this form may be emailed to customers. If it is a macro-enabled file, the customer's email may reject it. I'm wondering if it is possible to program a template and have the .docx based on the .dotm work without having to be macro-enabled? Probably not?

Thanks for your help!

Content control list boxes are not limited to 25 entries or 75 characters. 40 products and 140 characters shouldn't present a problem - You may find https://www.gmayor.com/insert_content_control_addin.htm useful to populate the list from an Excel worksheet.
The calculations are a different issue entirely and cannot be achieved without macros which will have to be provided to the user. If you are bothered about rejection, send users a link to a web resource in order to allow them to download the file.

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

Thanks, Gmayor.

These are comboboxes, not listboxes... still no restriction on length of list or number of characters?

Is it possible to populate the list from Excel once and have it "stick"? The client does not want to distribute an Excel workbook with the Word doc.

List and ComboBox content controls are essentially the same as far as the lists are concerned. Once populated the lists in the document remain populated until they are changed. Ensure that the content controls are locked against deletion.

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

Cross posted at Word Form Questions
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__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Macropod,
Duly noted, thank you. I'll follow the rules from now on.

Graham,
It turns out that the reason there were field limitations is that the original form was built using Legacy controls. My (new) understanding is that in order to get around the list # and character # limitations with Legacy comboboxes, userforms have to be opened as a workaround. This could work, but it would be clunky.

It sounds like content controls with VBA calculations could be a good way to go if my client feels confident that customers will always have up-to-date versions of Word?

What about ActiveX controls? I've read that they don't always perform well, but the article was not specific about the problems with them.

Are content controls the only ones that will remember the list that has been imported from Excel? I take it with Legacy controls, the Excel file would have to be distributed with the Word doc and new file paths would have to be established. Or I would have to hard-code the entire list to avoid working with Excel.

Thanks again!

You might find that no Office product really meets your needs.

On the Word side of things, formfields are supported by all Word versions and can be used in conjunction with formula fields for quite complex calculations without the need for a macro. ActiveX controls require macro support for any calculations and have never been supported on Macs. Content Controls also require macro support for calculations and are only supported on PCs from Office 2007 onwards and on Macs from Office 2013 onwards. Even on PCs, checkbox content controls are only supported in Office 2010 & later. Anything that requires macro support won't work if your clients disable macros. A docx file (or docm file with macros) is required for the use of content controls; if your client saves the file in the older .doc format, the content controls will be converted to whatever text they displayed at that time. Dropdown content controls and formfields can both import, and retain, list entries from a source such as Excel. ActiveX dropdowns have to be reinitialized whenever the document is opened. Userforms have essentially the same limitations as ActiveX controls, except that userforms are supported on Macs - apart from Mac Word 2008, which had no VBA support.

So, if you want the widest range of support, you'll need to use formfields. However, dropdown formfields are limited to 25 entries.

All of the above, of course, pre-supposes your clients have Microsoft Office. If they're using counterparts from, say, Open Office or Google, all bets are off.

Accordingly, you may need to consider using a PDF form. PDFs are supported on a much wider range of platforms than any Word document.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Paul has covered all the various provisos, but I am not sure that PDF forms are a way forward. They can include calculations and dropdown lists (though you'd have to check with Adobe for the limitations - unless Paul knows) and they can employ JavaScript programming, but they make it more difficult to extract and collate the data from the forms. They are however transportable across platforms, provided security doesn't block the javascript.

I discovered when programming https://www.gmayor.com/ExtractDataFromForms.htm that content controls were up to six times faster to process to extract data than legacy form fields, (and Word 2010 faster than later versions, but that's another story) which can be significant with a large number of forms to process.

Incidentally you may find https://www.gmayor.com/insert_content_control_addin.htm useful as it contains a utility to convert legacy form fields to content controls and all the tools necessary to populate and edit your lists.

For anything that requires calculations in Word documents using content controls you are probably going to have to use macros, even if only to update fields. e.g. you can add fields to a rich text content control to calculate bookmarked values from other controls, but they will not update automatically. The ability to calculate without the aid of macros is the only advantage of legacy form fields, but they fall at the first hurdle with the list limitations.

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