Document Protection (Word 97)

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What I want to do is have a 4 page form that is completed by one person, saved into a shared directory, which then can opened by other people – but the second and subsequent people who open the document will be unable to change the contents – except for a portion of the document, on the first page, that is used to indicate the disposition of the form. Is there a relatively easy way to do this?

The difference between Genius and Stupidity:
A Genius knows their limits.
- Albert Einstein

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A suggestion: Quick and dirty way: Save the form as a template. If it is a “protected form” throughout, fine. Include an AutoOpen macro in your template that disables all of the fields in the form except the ones you want your subsequent people to be able to change. You may also want to record a macro in your template that you can run to enable all of those fields since your AutoOpen will run when you open the template for editing.

This does not differentiate as to whether the person who opens the saved document is the person who wrote it or someone else. The fields would be locked to anyone except the person who created the document from your template.

You can get fancier but you asked for relatively easy.

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Thanks for the Q&D – this will work for the interim – eventually, I’ll need to have the document locked down a little tighter than what you have suggested, perhaps in a two stage process – once the disposition of the document has been noted and saved – I don’t want anyone changing anything within the document.

The difference between Genius and Stupidity:
A Genius knows their limits.
- Albert Einstein

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Forms protection is section specific, so if you create section breaks around the portions of the form in which changes are okay and protect everything else, you can get close. If the form is intended for multiple uses for different cases, Charles’ suggestion of first saving it as a template would help prevent people from overwriting one another’s entries in the portion they are allowed to change.

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What I was suggesting would give the person who creates the form based on the template access to fields that would not be available to anyone who opens the form subsequently (including the original creator). Again, just a quick and dirty way to approximate a goal.

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