cayce said:
Is it possible to create Wizard in Word? My thought is to walk a user
through a series of questions. As they answer, certain areas of the
document would populate with appropriate content language. They could
actually build a document cafeteria style.
Has anyone heard of Word having this kind of capability. If not Word,
any other applications without going to a full blown content
management system with XML tags, etc.
Thoughts would be appreciated.
thanks
Yes, with some effort that can be done. But you don't have to do all this
work yourself. Look at
http://www.wordsite.com/products/dpdas.htm to see
whether DataPrompter will serve your purpose instead of spending the time to
learn VBA, build your wizard, debug it, and handle users' complaints.
If that doesn't suit, here's some background:
Basically a wizard is a UserForm, a dialog programmed in VBA (macro)
language. A simple introduction to UserForms is at
http://www.word.mvps.org/FAQs/Userforms/CreateAUserForm.htm. The one shown
there is a single page that accepts two pieces of data and inserts them into
a document (based on a template) at predefined bookmarks. However, there's
much more capability available to you.
The thing that makes a UserForm behave as a wizard is that you can create
multiple pages with various kinds of controls. You can let the user navigate
through the pages in a fixed order (with Next and Back buttons), in random
order if that's appropriate (by providing a button to go to each page), or
in an order determined dynamically by the user's input in the controls. The
controls can include text fields, list boxes or combo boxes, option buttons,
check boxes, and more.
There are alternatives to the predefined bookmarks in the document. A more
robust solution involves the UserForm putting the user's responses into
"document variables" and using DocVariable fields to display the results.
You also have flexibility in the sources for the text that you envision as
the building blocks of the document. You can have AutoText entries stored in
the template, text in another Word document or Excel worksheet, a database,
a web service...
There's an entire newsgroup devoted to UserForms:
http://www.microsoft.com/communitie...t.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.word.vba.userforms
--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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