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!