Protecting a Form


After you have inserted all of the form fields into your form, you're ready to finalize it. The form fields in a form don't become active and ready to receive input from the user until you protect the form. When you protect a form, you restrict the user from modifying anything in the document other than the form fields themselves . Furthermore, when a form is protected, the user can press the Tab key to move from field to field (or press Shift+Tab to move to the previous field).

To protect a form without requiring a password to unprotect it, first choose View, Toolbars, Forms if the Forms toolbar is not already visible. Then click the Protect Form button on the Forms toolbar (refer to Figure 19.2).

Notice that most of the toolbar buttons and menu commands in the Word window are now dim because the user can't make changes to the text or formatting of the document. When you want to make changes to the form, click the Protect Form button again to unprotect the document.

If you want to require a password to unprotect the document, use this method of protecting the document instead:

  1. Open the document whose formatting you want to restrict, and choose Tools, Protect Document .

  2. In the Protect Document task pane that appears, mark the Allow Only This Type of Editing in the Document check box, and then choose Filling in Forms in the list box under Editing Restrictions (see Figure 19.12).

    Figure 19.12. Select Filling in Forms to restrict people to filling in forms as opposed to modifying them.

    graphics/19fig12.jpg

  3. Click the Yes, Start Enforcing Protection button in the Protect Document task pane.

  4. Word displays the Start Enforcing Protection dialog box. Enter and re-enter a password that will be required to remove the protection, and then click OK .

The document is now protected. To remove the protection, you can either choose Tools, Unprotect Document or click the Protect Form button in the Forms toolbar. If you required a password in step 5 in the preceding step sequence, you will be required to enter it now.

When you've protected your form, you're ready to save it as a template, as described in the next section.

graphics/lightbulb_icon.gif

If you want some parts of a document to remain unprotected after you have protected the part that contains the form fields, you need to divide the document into sections (see "Varying the Page Formatting in Your Document" in Hour 8 if you need help with this), and then protect only the section(s) that contains form fields. When your document has multiple sections, a Select Sections link appears under Editing Restrictions in the Protect Document task pane. Click this link to display the Select Protection dialog box, clear the check boxes for the sections that you don't want to protect, and click OK.




Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Office Word 2003 in 24 Hours
Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Office Word 2003 in 24 Hours
ISBN: 067232556X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 315
Authors: Heidi Steele

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