Hi there. I am pretty frustrated trying to figure this out. Perhaps some you of you geniuses can help me. I have a World document that is a template for lesson plans for my school. Certain text is "locked" in that I cannot edit it. And then there are these grey boxes. It's like a form that I have to fill out--but the are extremely inconvenient as I cannot copy/paste easily. It's impossible to "select" a small portion of text. I've added some screenshots if that helps explain what I am talking about.





Everything that isn't a grey box is not editable. Why is that? And the grey boxes make things so difficult. What are they? Why isn't it just a standard table? Thanks!

P.S. I'm using Office 2013 for Windows primarily, but also have Mac 2016 and this has the same behavior in both.

The document is a protected form. It is designed so that you can only enter text in the form fields. That's the whole point of it. Such forms are usually employed to gather data in a consistent format.

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Graham Mayor - MS MVP (Word) (2002-2019)
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Ahh. Got it. How obnoxious to make it password protected. Is there anything I can do about that? Who knows who set the password. Thanks!

Aha! Thanks for the help guys--actually just figured it out myself. Bye bye hash. Super simple and unlocked!

It wouldn't have taken me so long to figure out the protected form part, except there is no option of the "Developer" tab on the 2016 Mac version of Word (unless it's hidden somewhere differently than the Windows version).

Since I've got all the experts "in the room," is there a way that I can now lock the text like it was before but WITHOUT those pesky text boxes (the grey things!)? I changed a few of those "placeholders" that don't need to be edited, and it would be cool if I could just TAB my way through the table copying/pasting without overwriting those default texts (e.g.. Day 1, Day 2 in the photo).

Thanks again for all the help! Love this place!

(Now using 2013 on Windows)

It looks like "Restrict Editing" on the Developer tab only gives me options to make it Read Only, Track Changes, or FILLING IN FORMS. I guess that's the closest I can get is to make forms for each place I want to edit? But that doesn't work well with multiple line copy/pastes.

Is there a way to just do the Opposite of that--which would be make everything editable except those handful of cells that I want locked? Or am I just wishing!? Ha!

Thanks!
Robert

Restrict Editing - no changes
Add exceptions for the areas you want to be able to edit. Make the exception for everyone.

Making Forms with Microsoft Word
Word Content Controls

Yes! Thank you--exactly what I needed. Who knew all of these features existed in Microsoft Word!? It's like an all new app for me to play with now!

Thanks again!
Robert

Word keeps growing like Topsy!

One more addition:
Every time I open this file that I have "restricted edits" on, it opens in a strange "read only" view, and when I click out of this view to "edit" the file, all of the Orange cursors appear (that are the cause of the "Highlight the Regions I can edit" check box under "Restrict Editing." Obviously I can uncheck that, but is there a way to make it so that doesn't happen every single time I open this new template of mine?