Excel Report Form

[PissLord]

I work for a jail and am trying to simplify my life by creating an electronic version of our department report form. In order for me to be able to use this form though it must be approved by management for use by all employees. The requirements that were given to me for the behavior of this were mostly easy to meet, but I am having problems with one area.
First of all, the report must be made in Excel format because not all of our computers have Word installed. The report must not be able to be saved after it is altered so I made it a template. The user must only be able to alter the contents of cells that are for user input. That was no problem. The cells must not be able to have their dimensions altered, or have the font size/style changed. No problem with that either. Now, the problem is, they want the body of the report (which is currently one large cell)to behave like a Word document instead of an excel cell (pushing enter starts a new paragraph, and the tab key causes an indent, etc.). I tried inserting a Word document object into the cell, but when it was protected it's contents was not able to be changed by the user (which must be possible), and when it was unprotected it's size and font were changeable by the user(which must not be possible). I have no idea what to do at this point, I don't even know for certain that this is possible. Please help!
Thanks in advance for any replies, and I look forward to reading any suggestions.

 

[tusharm]

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it would seem you have a 'no-win' problem on your hands.

The task you are working on is "take this chicken and make it walk, talk, smell, and taste like a duck."

The 'start new para' can be done with ALT-ENTER. However, I can't think of how to 'indent' text within a cell -- other than some complicated macro based solution that _simulates_ a TAB.

A more important question for you to ask yourself is that, even if you solved these two problems, what will the 'etc.' part involve?

 

[Ivan F Moala]

On 2002-06-02 00:21, PissLord wrote:

Now, the problem is, they want the body of the report (which is currently one large cell)to behave like a Word document instead of an excel cell (pushing enter starts a new paragraph, and the tab key causes an indent, etc.).... but when it was protected it's contents was not able to be changed by the user (which must be possible), and when it was unprotected it's size and font were changeable by the user(which must not be possible). I have no idea what to do at this point, I don't even know for certain that this is possible. Please help!
Thanks in advance for any replies, and I look forward to reading any suggestions.

One possible option is to have this cell (protected...) initiate a Userform with a Textbox, 2 X Buttons (to update & amend to the sheet).

Just set the Textbox's Properties
EnterKeyBehaviour = True
MultiLine = True
TabKeybehaviou = True
Wordwrap = True

Make the Textbox large enough to take text
as required.
The textbox will have all the functionality of a Text editor (tab, enter, delete etc) but without the abilty to change fonts etc.

Buttons can be used to write to the Cell when finished.......

 

[PissLord]

Ok, thanks for the suggestion Ivan, but now another question. I have never used ActiveX controls, and I have never used VBscript for excel. How would I make my two buttons interact with the sheet and the textbox? Where would be the best place to place the buttons? I have just never gotten into using excel to learn these things yet.