Locking Documents and Drop-Down Lists

[Andrew H]

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.