Help with Ask fields in Word 2007

[Jeremy]

I have a word template that I have created. I am going to be distributing
this document internationally and don't want to have to manage change
controls on multiple documents.

Since we decided against using an Infopath form via forms services I had to
scale back on the functionality in a few areas such as repeating rows and
fields. That being said, I can't figure out how to accomplish something that
should be rather simple.

I need to ask the user to enter their region when the form template is first
opened, display it in the footer. I can't figure out how to only allow entry
values of "NA" for North America or "EA" for Europe/Asia. I need the entries
to one of these two because I also need to be able to adjust the format of
all of the date dropdowns in the form based on this selection.

I of course don't know how to accomplish this. I suspect this will have to
be done with VBA instead of ASK fields but I am not sure how to accomplish
Asking for one of two answers without placing dropdown in the form or how to
change the format of the date pickers based on the selection.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[macropod]

Hi Jeremy,

You can't limit the input in either ASK fields or FILLIN fields. For what you've described, it seems you need something akin to a
DropDown formfield. However, for a DropDown formfield to work, you'd need to apply forms protection to the Section in which it
appears in the document, and that limits the users' ability to do other edits as well.

 

[Peter Jamieson]

One possibility would be to tell your users that anything they enter
that starts with "N" means "North America" and anything that starts with
anything else (probably including spaces) means Europe/Asia.

Then you could use something like

{ ASK inputregion "your prompt text" \o }{ IF "{ REF inputregion \*Upper
}" = "N" "{ SET region "NA" }" "{ SET region "EA" }" }

Then you can use { region } or { REF region } to display the region code.

Not very nice, but if you would prefer to avoid VBA it may be enough.

Peter Jamieson

http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk