Protection marks in Word 2003

W2003 offers protection of parts of documents. When applying protection,
those parts are bounded by square brackets (same in appearance as bookmarks).
When protecting part of a table, a pair of brackets appears in every single
cell. It appears IMPOSSIBLE to hide them, and renders the feature useless
except for substantial blocks of text.

Beth
Fri Nov 12 08:28:58 CST 2004

I'm not sure I follow what you are saying. The brackets ([]) or " I "
, depending on how you marked the exception, indicate the areas that
are not protected.

How do you propose users know where the areas they can edit are
without a visual indication?

--
Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/


"Firebolt" <Firebolt@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:92EF456B-3874-4256-9639-308B4E028812@microsoft.com...
> W2003 offers protection of parts of documents. When applying
> protection,
> those parts are bounded by square brackets (same in appearance as
> bookmarks).
> When protecting part of a table, a pair of brackets appears in every
> single
> cell. It appears IMPOSSIBLE to hide them, and renders the feature
> useless
> except for substantial blocks of text.

Firebolt
Fri Nov 12 10:12:01 CST 2004

Thanks very much Beth. I propose to highlight areas that can be modified
with background colour where they are cells in a table, and with colour
bounded by a boxed paragraph in more freeform areas of the doc. It would be
quite apparent to other users from this and from context - honest! But in a
table with cells sized to take only a few chars, the dozens of pairs of [ ]
make a real mess of it. This is why I wish to hide the [].

A further but surmountable difficulty is Word's use of colour for this
protection. The space between opening [ and closing ] in each cell is filled
by a grey colour when areas excepted from protection are first highlighted.
This then changes to a pale ivory colour when enforcement is applied. In a
table with tall narrow columns, the result is a really ragged appearance
(easier for you to try yourself than for me to describe, but I can email an
example if helpful). I have overcome this by filling the background of the
cells with a colour I have RGB-matched to the ivory, so to a viewer the cell
has a uniform ivory colour.

Doing this makes clear the modifiable part of the table....and in so doing,
makes redundant the [ ] [ ]. Hope I have made sense.

"Beth Melton" wrote:

> I'm not sure I follow what you are saying. The brackets ([]) or " I "
> , depending on how you marked the exception, indicate the areas that
> are not protected.
>
> How do you propose users know where the areas they can edit are
> without a visual indication?
>
> Beth Melton
> Microsoft Office MVP
>
> "Firebolt" <Firebolt@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:92EF456B-3874-4256-9639-308B4E028812@microsoft.com...
> > W2003 offers protection of parts of documents. When applying
> > protection,
> > those parts are bounded by square brackets (same in appearance as
> > bookmarks).
> > When protecting part of a table, a pair of brackets appears in every
> > single
> > cell. It appears IMPOSSIBLE to hide them, and renders the feature
> > useless
> > except for substantial blocks of text.