making a 'soft' letterhead and want to lockelements but allow text entry

[abacws]

Version: 2008 Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Processor: Power PC I have to make an e-letterhead, essentially a template/form with all the common elements such as logo, address and footer all locked in place, but allowing anyone to enter text eg: write a letter but not allow them to be able to move the common stuff so the corporate look and style is preserved.
Have tried to find a way to lock down three pieces - an image, a text box and another text box but no luck, any ideas? thanks everyone for any help.

 

[Rob Schneider]

Frankly, every time in my corporate experience when it was tried to
"lock-down" Word templates like this, they never worked very well.

Better to make a great template, using styles in the proper ways, e.g.
styles defined for the basic elements of the letter (date, saluation,
inside address, body, signature, file reference, etc.) and then populate
the headers/footers with the right stuff ... should be sufficient.

With a great and easy to use tool, people will just do it right. They
have interest in making the letters look right and will do so because
it's the right thing to do and it's easy. If you lock down everything
(and not sure you can), it becomes hard to do and it just goes down from
there.

Word is a tool for authors. it's not a great tool for building
locked-down templates.


--rms

www.rmschneider.com

 

[abacws]

Hey thanks Rob, I agree with just about all you say!

Our initial approach was to try and get the logo (top left) and the address & contact info text (6 or 7 lines top right) into a header but this then pushed the available space for writing down.

Similar story with the footer which had a couple of lines of centred text with a small logo bottom right. We just couldn't figure out how to get those elements into a header and footer and then have a text box over the lot without everything moving and jumping about - which was why we thought lets lock those bits down.

Can you tell us how to get mixed elements - images and text - into a header/footer and protect them? That would probably do it for us )

 

[CyberTaz]

You cannot 'lock' anything, but the procedure you need is here:

http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/Letterhead.htm

That's about as close as you can get. See the instructions near the bottom
of the page if you expect the 'letters' or whatever to extend beyond 1 page.

HTH |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[John McGhie]

I agree with Rob:

You can surround the various things you do not want changed with section
breaks. You then use the Protect Document command to protect specified
sections against editing.

But my experience is the same as Rob: People don't come to work trying to do
a bad job. If you produce a good template that works well, they will simply
"use" it.

On the other hand, a tightly-locked template is a chore to maintain, and
very unreliable cross-platform, particularly in a different version of Word.

Cheers

Frankly, every time in my corporate experience when it was tried to
"lock-down" Word templates like this, they never worked very well.

Better to make a great template, using styles in the proper ways, e.g.
styles defined for the basic elements of the letter (date, saluation,
inside address, body, signature, file reference, etc.) and then populate
the headers/footers with the right stuff ... should be sufficient.

With a great and easy to use tool, people will just do it right. They
have interest in making the letters look right and will do so because
it's the right thing to do and it's easy. If you lock down everything
(and not sure you can), it becomes hard to do and it just goes down from
there.

Word is a tool for authors. it's not a great tool for building
locked-down templates.


--rms

www.rmschneider.com

--

The email below is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless I ask you to; or unless you intend to pay!

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410 | mailto:[email protected]

 

[abacws]

I agree with Rob:

>
> You can surround the various things you do not want changed with section
> breaks. You then use the Protect Document command to protect specified
> sections against editing.
>
> But my experience is the same as Rob: People don't come to work trying to do
> a bad job. If you produce a good template that works well, they will simply
> "use" it.
>
> On the other hand, a tightly-locked template is a chore to maintain, and
> very unreliable cross-platform, particularly in a different version of Word.
>
> Cheers
>
>
> On 27/04/10 10:18 PM, in article [email protected], "Rob
> Schneider" wrote:
>
>
> --
>
> The email below is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
> matters unless I ask you to; or unless you intend to pay!
>
> John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
> McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
> Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410 | mailto:[email protected]
>
>
> Thanks to all you guys from all over the globe, and thanks Bob for that link, I'm pretty hopeful we can get a solution from here, best regards to you all from us here in the UK, have a good one

Mike