M
Morgan
Hello all,
I'm going nuts trying to figure out how to create templates that
populate from a data source, are completely editable, yet also have
some way of marking and retrieving text from the populated locations
in the document.
The obvious answer to this is to use either form fields or bookmarks,
since they both contain ranges and they can both be referenced with an
associated name property. And they do indeed work, but they are easy
to unintentionally delete by the users, which makes later parsing and
retrieval of text from said fields impossible.
I ran across one interesting idea to get around this limitation, which
is to assign each form field its own section, and then to set those
sections to ProtectedForForms = True. This ALMOST worked - which is,
of course, even more frustrating than total failure
.
Unfortunately, Word can't have multiple section breaks - even
continuous section breaks - in a single line, and a number of my
templates need to have four or five fields in close proximity. Having
line breaks between them would be unacceptable for many of the
templates, particularly the legal documents.
A similar limitation occurs with bookmarks, but there I can't both
protect the bookmark and assure that it won't be typed over
accidentally. If I protect them then they can't be manually edited,
but if I don't it only takes one long select and over-type and they're
gone.
I had previously been using Document Property fields to populate the
document using the Custom Document Properties, auto-updating them,
then detaching the fields from their references to make them
editable. The problem is that once that's been done, I can't
programmatically retrieve information from those fields, which makes
future data gathering impossible - or manual, which is essentially the
same for me
I came up with a little function to find and store the index locations
of each field in the document for later reference if I ended up having
to use a type of field that doesn't have a name property - like a
Quote field, for example - but I always end up running into the
protection issue.
The only thing I can think of other than that is to have the field
areas linked to button-type macros that activate on double-click, but
it would be a huge pain to convert all of my templates to use such a
system, and I really don't like the idea of implementing such a code-
intensive task for every field in a document if it's at all possible
to avoid it.
If necessary, I'll just eschew my dreams of data retrieval and stick
with the Document Property fields, but I'd *really* prefer not to.
Surely this isn't such a wild concept - can anyone help?
Thanks,
Morgan
I'm going nuts trying to figure out how to create templates that
populate from a data source, are completely editable, yet also have
some way of marking and retrieving text from the populated locations
in the document.
The obvious answer to this is to use either form fields or bookmarks,
since they both contain ranges and they can both be referenced with an
associated name property. And they do indeed work, but they are easy
to unintentionally delete by the users, which makes later parsing and
retrieval of text from said fields impossible.
I ran across one interesting idea to get around this limitation, which
is to assign each form field its own section, and then to set those
sections to ProtectedForForms = True. This ALMOST worked - which is,
of course, even more frustrating than total failure
.Unfortunately, Word can't have multiple section breaks - even
continuous section breaks - in a single line, and a number of my
templates need to have four or five fields in close proximity. Having
line breaks between them would be unacceptable for many of the
templates, particularly the legal documents.
A similar limitation occurs with bookmarks, but there I can't both
protect the bookmark and assure that it won't be typed over
accidentally. If I protect them then they can't be manually edited,
but if I don't it only takes one long select and over-type and they're
gone.
I had previously been using Document Property fields to populate the
document using the Custom Document Properties, auto-updating them,
then detaching the fields from their references to make them
editable. The problem is that once that's been done, I can't
programmatically retrieve information from those fields, which makes
future data gathering impossible - or manual, which is essentially the
same for me
I came up with a little function to find and store the index locations
of each field in the document for later reference if I ended up having
to use a type of field that doesn't have a name property - like a
Quote field, for example - but I always end up running into the
protection issue.
The only thing I can think of other than that is to have the field
areas linked to button-type macros that activate on double-click, but
it would be a huge pain to convert all of my templates to use such a
system, and I really don't like the idea of implementing such a code-
intensive task for every field in a document if it's at all possible
to avoid it.
If necessary, I'll just eschew my dreams of data retrieval and stick
with the Document Property fields, but I'd *really* prefer not to.
Surely this isn't such a wild concept - can anyone help?
Thanks,
Morgan