Hi all,



I hope you can help.

I've paid for someone to create a form in Word for me. However when the form is locked, every time I click in a box the cursor jumps to the next field.

When I unlock the form this doesn't happen however, it means that the checkboxes in the form won't work.

It is unlikely that the form will ever be printed so inserting new checkboxes in the bullet point format unfortunately is not a solution.

I'm also reluctant to have an unlocked form as it's possible that recipients of the form will amend bits of the form.

I'm using 2011 Word for Mac and have tested this form on other Macs, which is the primary type of machine that will open this form and still no luck.

If anyone as any suggestions it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

M

If these boxes' you're referring to are just ordinary textboxes and/or table cells, the behaviour is by design. The only way such features can be accessed once 'filling in forms' protection is applied is by putting Section breaks either side of them and leaving the Sections containing the ordinary textboxes and/or table cells unprotected when applying the 'filling in forms' protection.

The other possibility is that whoever designed the form used a mix of content controls and formfields. These were never designed to work together and problems such as you describe are typical in that scenario. Moreover, content controls don't work properly on Macs and ActiveX controls (just in case those have been used) don't work at all on Macs.

Anyone designing forms for Macs should know all this.

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

Hi Macropod, could you please give me some guidance about creating section?

I'm a real novice to all these things. Thanks for your advice!

I don't have a Mac with which to give Mac-specific advice. On a PC, Section breaks are created via Page Layout>Breaks. Since you paid for this, I suggest you take it back to whever did the development and get them to fix it. As I said in my previous post, anyone designing forms for Macs should know all this - it's pretty basic stuff.

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

Thanks Macropod.

When I briefed the developer I said specifically that this would be used on Macs but she has designed it on PC and says she cant see any of the problems I'm having and that "sometimes things just don't work on a Mac".

Anyway thanks fr your advice I will try and have a play around and see where I get to.

B

This has nothing to do with PC-vs-Mac differences. Formfields, Section breaks, textboxes, etc. work exactly the same way on both. Your developer's response suggests a serious lack of ethics...

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

Glad to know I'm not going crazy, and you share my sentiment.

I've managed to find a workaround based on your advice, thanks very much! I finally have a working form :-)