Locking School Reports

[talksr]

Hi, I would appreciate any help on this.

SLT have asked me to make a word document of a school report template for them editable only in certain areas as they would like the format of the report to be locked, and staff to only be able to edit certain areas.

 

I worked through the document and made it an editable PDF. Everything worked perfectly and this took some time to lock down so that only the areas the SLT wanted could be edited.

 

This isn't good enough as it is a PDF and that relies on every staff member having Adobe PDF software on their computer. If they open it on Chrome, it can't be edited. So they asked, can I do the same but to the Word Document.

 

I spent some time last week doing the same but to a Word document. This now is also not good enough as in the editable fields I have created, staff cannot insert bullet points or use spellchecker to ensure they have not made spelling mistakes - the staff in question are teachers, so if they can't spell, god help us.

 

I am working on this Word Document using Review Tab>Protect>Restrict Editing>Editing Restrictions>Allow only this type of editing in the document: Filling in forms.

 

Does anyone know if using Word, it is possible to allow the text boxes to have bullets inserted and for Spell Check to be used??

I have the developer tab enabled in Word and I had been inserting Rich Text Content Control into the areas where SLT wanted staff to be able to enter in text.

 

I notice there is an option in developer under Controls for Legacy Tools>Legacy Forms>Text Form Field.

Does anyone know if the Text Form Field would be a better choice?

 

Thanks in advance.

Edited May 18, 2023 by talksr

[mavhc]

If you have Office 365 and will be co-editing, so there's one online document that everyone can edit at once, which is best for reports:

 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/allow-changes-to-parts-of-a-protected-document-187ed01c-8795-43e1-9fd0-c9fca419dadf

 

Probably easiest to just select the areas to edit and tick Everyone as there's no mention of Groups

[msi_school]

Have you considered a more lateral approach to this and using spread sheets or a data base to mail merge the final report?

[mavhc]

Those don't have spellcheck though