Thanks very much Beth. I propose to highlight areas that can be modified
with background colour where they are cells in a table, and with colour
bounded by a boxed paragraph in more freeform areas of the doc. It would be
quite apparent to other users from this and from context - honest! But in a
table with cells sized to take only a few chars, the dozens of pairs of [ ]
make a real mess of it. This is why I wish to hide the [].
A further but surmountable difficulty is Word's use of colour for this
protection. The space between opening [ and closing ] in each cell is filled
by a grey colour when areas excepted from protection are first highlighted.
This then changes to a pale ivory colour when enforcement is applied. In a
table with tall narrow columns, the result is a really ragged appearance
(easier for you to try yourself than for me to describe, but I can email an
example if helpful). I have overcome this by filling the background of the
cells with a colour I have RGB-matched to the ivory, so to a viewer the cell
has a uniform ivory colour.
Doing this makes clear the modifiable part of the table....and in so doing,
makes redundant the [ ] [ ]. Hope I have made sense.
Beth Melton said:
I'm not sure I follow what you are saying. The brackets ([]) or " I "
, depending on how you marked the exception, indicate the areas that
are not protected.
How do you propose users know where the areas they can edit are
without a visual indication?
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP
Firebolt said:
W2003 offers protection of parts of documents. When applying
protection,
those parts are bounded by square brackets (same in appearance as
bookmarks).
When protecting part of a table, a pair of brackets appears in every
single
cell. It appears IMPOSSIBLE to hide them, and renders the feature
useless
except for substantial blocks of text.
