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macropod · 06-17-2019, 04:38 PM

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.