We have a protected .dot word form that was created using legacy form fields. I've been tasked with two things: Enabling spellcheck on these forms, and automatically summing some of the fields so the user doesn't have to.
I would really rather not use macros because I can't guarantee that the people who will be using this will have them enabled. If it comes to it though, it's better than nothing.
My first goal was to get spellcheck working. I've found that the legacy fields on a protected document can't be spellchecked without adding some complicated macro code. And then there's the issue of triggering it. I can tell it to trigger on every field exit, but then the user gets an annoying popup about how the spellcheck has finished without error every time they leave a field. I don't see any way to just enable the red-squiggly-line active spellchecking.
So then I decided to just abandon the legacy fields and use the new content control settings. I don't need to retain 2003 compatibility so why not make the jump? Well, spellcheck with those fields works perfectly until I protect the document. I worked around it by just grouping the whole document, which lets the spellcheck do it's thing on the fields. Really the protection was only there to prevent accidental edits to the source doc, not to prevent malicious activity, so the grouping should work fine.
So onto the equations. I need to sum four fields. I found this, but that only seems to work with legacy fields. I found this way to do equations with content control fields, but that uses macros and I'm still trying to avoid them.
So then I decided to just use the legacy fields for the math fields, since they won't need to be spellchecked. That doesn't work because when I group the doc (instead of protecting), I lose the ability to edit those fields. But if I protect it, I lose the spellcheck in the new fields.
I don't know if there is an answer to all my problems here, but why can't Word forms just be easy? Even the new content control fields look worse than the legacy fields. The placeholder text is printed if you want to fill out the document by hand. You can replace the placeholder text with spaces, but then there is nothing to indicate to the user that a field is there (the legacy fields are shaded gray until entered). You'd think that the new Content Control form tools would be way better than the legacy forms that have been around since, what, 97? Instead they just cause more problems than they solve.
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http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25364335-
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