Fill Word fields as well as edit document

[Chim20]

Hello,

My question: I would like to know if there is a way to edit everything in a Word document except a field so that a user can still fill in the fields, but also edit everything else?

In case someone suggests another approach, below is why I need this. There still may be another way that I am not thinking of though:

My research group has used Word documents to track each experiment we run, and store information such as run number, date, user, temperatures, etc. A lot of this information is useful for diagnosing issues with our equipment. However, there has been no way to collect a specific data from run to run besides manually looking it up in each Word document. I decided to create an Access database where all information that is collected for each run is stored. This would be great alone if we wanted to stop using our Word documents, but everyone would rather stay consistent with those. Therefore, I edited the Word document to have fields for all the values I want to store in Access. I then wrote a VB program to extract all that data from the various fields into my Access database.

Here is the problem: In order for the fields to be usable, it seems that I have to restrict the document to filling in forms only. However, there is a lot of other information in the Word document that is specific to a single experiment, so I would like the user to be able to edit everything that is not a field, as well as be able to fill in the fields. It looks like I can have things split up into sections and have the user be able to edit specific sections, but for how we have our document set up that is not practical. So that is why I would like to know if there is a way to edit everything in a document except the fields, where the user can still fill in a field?

Thanks

[Charles Kenyon]

You could use content controls set so that they cannot be deleted. Not sure how you would get the data in from Access, though.