Thank you Jay & Stefan.
The hiding and unhiding would have to be done by the end users, who have a
wide range of technical skills. If I hid the text, many would not know it was
there, or how to unhide it- so I don't think that will be a workable option
for this project.
I like the idea of embedding the Excel worksheet, and will explore that
further. At least in preliminary testing, my concerns are
(a) will it look 'professional' enough - it isn't a seamless interface; the
user has to double-click the embedded Excel table, then the OLE 'box' appears
with column and row labels, etc.
(b) for the areas we do leave 'visible', the user still has to double click
to enter data (for folks at the low end of the technical spectrum, that could
still be a problem).
My further testing will also have to include how the OLE object acts when
the Word document is protected (the goal is to protect everything except the
data entry areas). I'm a little worried about how to ensure that they could
enter their data but also not change the format or structure within Excel (so
I'd have a protected Excel document embedded in a protected Word document)
Last challenge would be to figure out how to use VBA to extract data from
the embedded Excel file(s), instead of just from the surface Word document.
I already have a headache, just thinking about all of this. It may be a good
rationale for moving everyone from Word to an online form...
Thank you again for your suggestions,
Keith
(2) Embed a section of an Excel worksheet in the Word document and use
Excel's functionality.
This is probably my best option, if I can make it look 'professional' enough
and not
