Word 2010


I have some Word forms (form fields in tables) that are used for ongoing collection of information. The documents are protected as forms. Sometimes it is necessary to edit the form (the text, not the form field contents), so I unprotect and make the change. When I re-protect as a form, the form fields are all cleared. I press Ctrl + Z to undo, but would rather not have the form fields cleared in the first place. Is this possible?

I do not observe this in Word 2010.
How are you re-protecting the document? By pressing the Start Enforcing button?

Unless you need compatibility with menu versions of Word, you should consider changing over to Content Controls from legacy form fields. I've heard of problems with formfields in Word 2013 and 2016.

Also, consider using templates for your forms rather than documents.
Templates in Microsoft Word

This makes it easier to make sure modifications are used and may even obviate the need for you to have a protected form at all. Each use creates a new document from the template and you do not have to worry about someone saving over your form.

Thanks for the reply. This reply is longer than I intended, but I'll leave it as is and hope it isn't too daunting.

Your question got me to thinking about something, which turned out to solve the problem of the form fields clearing. I often have to protect and unprotect documents, so I added an icon to the Quick Start toolbar. However, the command I chose was Protect Document rather than Restrict Editing. It does the same thing in most cases (although with a pop-up dialog box rather than a panel on the right), but with forms it clears the form fields when applying protection as a form. In all cases I have discovered so far Protect Document unprotects reliably with one click. However, for re-protecting it has the anomaly I have described when there are form fields, so I will use Restrict Editing instead for that task.

I use templates for many things, certainly in situations where filling out a form is about filling in the information and saving the result, and the document is not likely to be edited again, just as with a paper form that is completed and filed.

However, I have a couple of different situations that happened to come up at the same time. In one

One is a sort of periodic evaluation. The beginning of the document contains legacy form fields for Employee, Date, and a few other things. On subsequent pages there are field codes that reference the bookmarks assigned to the form fields, so the employee name (for instance) appears on every page, but is only typed once. The evaluations are printed and then completed by hand, so there is no need to save a completed document for each person. Rather, the person's name and other information is typed into the form fields, the document is printed, the name is changed (other information tends to be the same when a batch of documents are printed), and it is printed again.

The other is a log of documents that have been reviewed by a number of people. The overall structure is a table, with documents listed vertically on the left and reviewers horizontally on top. In the cell where documents and a reviewers intersect I use form fields for the review dates because it simplifies data entry and makes it more consistent. For today's date I can just enter 10/6 (year is not needed if it is the current year), and the form field applies the correct date format.

The protect/unprotect issue came up in the first case because when it is time for a new evaluation it is based in part on the previous one, so the previous one is copied and revised. In the second case, new documents need to be reviewed from time to time. In the first case I may be able to break the document into sections and apply form protection only to the sections with form fields, but in the second case I don't think I can have the leftmost column of a table be one section and the rest of the table the other.

The use of Restrict Editing rather than Protect Document solved the problem with form fields being cleared (yet reversible with Ctrl + Z), but your suggestion about Content Controls got me to wondering if it is time to move to the current system. Help is no help. A search for Content Control returns a list of about 25 topics, none of which contain the words "content control". Maybe the information is in one of those links, but I would rather not have to go fishing. Do you know of a link to information about how to manage content controls? I will do some investigations and experimentation, but I would prefer to avoid running into a lot of rabbit holes.

Greg Maxey has a free tool that will convert legacy formfields to content controls.
Content Control Tools (search for "convert" for more about this).

Here is his general page describing Content Controls. Word Content Controls
Greg's site is my "go-to" place for information on content controls. The pages can get a bit involved because he tries to cover all sorts of possibilities, but they are much more in-depth than most sites.

See also Mapped Content Controls and Document Properties.

Thanks so much! Those look like some excellent links. I have only had a few minutes to put into reading the information, but already I understand content controls much better than I did.