I have created a drop-down list and am struggling with the whole issue of needing to "lock" the document before the drop-down list becomes active.



As a preliminary aside, does anyone know why one (seemingly) needs to lock a document in order to "activate" a drop-down list. I am a total novice, but it strikes me as an odd requirement.

In any event, I want to implement the following functionality: Since my drop-down list is in a document that otherwise requires text entry, I only want the document to be locked when the person entering information is actually using that particular drop-down list.

When I defined the drop-down list, I noticed the "Run Macro On Entry" and "Run Macro On Exit" selection boxes. Naturally, I assume that what I should do is to create the following macros and invoke them, respectively, in these two selection boxes:

1. A macro that locks the document when the user "clicks" the drop-down list field, even though it does not appear to be a drop-down. NOTE: Incidentally, it seems to me that even thoughthe document (apparently) needs to be locked in order to "activate" a drop-down menu, the drop-down symbol should still be presented to the viewer when the document is an unlocked state. Otherwise, how will the user know that this is a drop-down box?

2. A macro that unlocks the documents after the user has made their selection.

I am stuck on the "on entry" aspect. I have read that the macro that runs "on entry" should be activatedwhen the user "clicks" in the field that "holds" the drop-down list (even though it will not appear to be a drop-down list when the document is unlocked). I have a simple macro that I know works (it changes the background color of the whole document). However, when I select that macro to run "on entry", nothing happens when I click in the field that holds the drop-down list. Any thoughts? - it appears that I am not setting things up properly to run a macro "on entry" or I do not understand what "on entry" actually means.

Surely there must be many users who want to create documents that contain drop-down lists, and yet otherwise need to be unlocked (except, of course, when these lists are being used). Therefore, I would have expected some kind of control, offered directly in the dialog box for defining the drop-down list, that would allow for the specification of the kind of behaviour I am after. Surely any user whose document requires "regular text entry" would want exactly the kind of behaviour I am seeking. I therefore suspect that, as is usually the case when it seems to me that a sophisticated product (like Word) lacks obviously desireable functionality, I am probably suffering from some sort of fundamental misunderstanding.

Hi Andrew,

Forms protection with formfields is required by design. In part it's so the user can't makes edits other than what the designer intends/allows - including deleting the formfields. On-entry and on-exit macros will only run when the document is protected.

If you want to allow free text entry somewhere else in the document, insert Section breaks before & after that portion, then leave that Section unprotected when you apply the forms protection.

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

OK - makes sense.

OK, that news to me, but thanks: that explains why my macro would not run.

Thanks, but this does not solve my problem. And the reason is this: I need to be able to have "locked" fields and "unlocked" text in the same line. It appears that I cannot insert section breaks "inside" a given line.