drop down selections to populate table (summary)

[wolterl]

Greetings,
I have a 22 page Word document from which I am trying to make an automated
template.
The template will be constructed in Word 2007 but saved for Word 2003 users
to fill out.

I have 124 questions on the form, the first 2 with yes or no answers, the
remaining 122 with yes, no, NA answers. The questions are in 12 groups.

When a user fills out the form, I'd like a table to auto-summarize the
answers to the 124 questions by group. I'd also like the Yes and NA answers
to be tallied at the bottom of the table so that another calculation can be
done to arrive at a "score".

I believe I want to use drop down boxes so that only one answer can be
selected per question.

Guidance on how to accomplish these tasks would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you.

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

I am not sure what you mean by auto-summarize, but as you need this also to
Work in Word 2003, you should most probably use DropDown FormFields as used
in a document that is Protected for filling in forms. You can insert those
via the Legacy Tools folder in the Developer tab of the Ribbon.

With that type of formfield, you can run a macro on exit from each of them
that can be used to accumulate data on the selection made by the user from
each DropDown

Using

ActiveDocument.FormFields("DropDownBookmarkName").DropDown.Value

will return a number representing the position of the selected item in the
DropDown list.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP, originally posted via msnews.microsoft.com

 

[wolterl]

Thank you for your quick reply! Your answer partially clarified for me what I
need to do.

I'm not a Word "power user" (yet!) so "auto-summarize" was probably a bad
choice of words to explain what I am trying to accomplish.

My 12 sections of 'question groups' that users answer yes/no/NA with the
drop down box choices are each to be in rows on the left column of a table.

The table consists of 4 columns total: question group, Yes, No, and NA for
the column headers. (4 columns by 12 rows + header row)

The 124 questions answered by drop down box are divided (unequally) into the
12 'question groups'.

I'd somehow like to count the Yes, No, and NA answers per 'question group'
and display the counts in the table described above.

Right now I have to manually count through the 124 questions and fill out
the 12 row X 4 column table with the number of Yes, No, and NA answers in
each 'question group' in the appropriate boxes of the table.

That seems silly with Word's power, but I do not know how to go about making
Word do what I want it to do. I have the plan for what I want to do but not
the Word/VB knowledge to do it.

Thank you!

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

I am not quite clear on your layout

How are the questions themselves and the dropdown from which the user will
select their answer arranged?

Are they in separate two column tables (question in the first column, answer
in the second column) with all of the questions/answers for a group being
contained in a separate table with one row for each question? If so, do
these tables have a header row ?

If not, exactly how are the questions grouped?

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP, originally posted via msnews.microsoft.com

 

[wolterl]

The questions themselves are just a regular 22 page word processed document.
The questions are not in a table at all.

The table is just the 'question group' section names, and columns for each
of the 3 possible answers selected (Yes, No, NA). Its only purpose is to show
concisely the answers given to all 124 questions in the 22 page document, and
to get a 'score' based on the number of Yes, No, and NA questions.

The form is too large to handle well in Excel (because each question also
has a text field for comments) and I do not know that end users would have MS
Access.

It just seemed like it would be within Word's capabilities to be able to do
the form's table automatically from the data (answers) input by the user
rather than counting it all up by hand.

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

I am confident that Word can automatically do what you want IF THERE IS SOME
WAY OF IDENTIFYING WHICH QUESTIONS BELONG TO WHICH GROUP. You have not told
us how that can be done.

One way of doing it would be to have each group of question in a separate
table. It would then be possible to iterate through the rows of each table,
to calculate the number of each answer for the questions in that table and
insert that information into the corresponding location in the table that
you now have.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP, originally posted via msnews.microsoft.com