Calculating Form Fields

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated April 8, 2021)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003

In other WordTips you've learned how you can set up your form fields so that they perform calculations and display the results. When you print your form, Word updates the fields so that the results of the calculations are displayed in the form. What if you don't want to wait until printing in order to view the results?

Fortunately, Word provides a way you can do this. Make sure you follow these steps:

Make sure the Forms toolbar is displayed.
Unprotect your form so that you can change the options for each field.
Select a form field used in a calculation.
Click on the Form Field Options tool on the Forms toolbar. Word displays the Options dialog box for the field. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Options dialog box for a form field.

Make sure the Calculate on Exit check box is selected.
Click on OK.
Repeat steps 3 through 6 for each of the other fields used in your calculations.
Protect the form again.

You can now use the form as normal. Whenever you press Tab to move between fields, and you leave a field used in a calculation, Word recalculates all the fields in the form. The result is that your calculated fields are always updated, as desired. In reality, not every possible field is updated in your form; see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/157463 for more information. (This Knowledge Base article is for Word 97, but is still applicable to later versions of Word.) You can rest assured that all your form fields are updated, however.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (1456) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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What is 8 - 5?

2023-11-23 22:25:14

Tomek

@Veronica Pavia:
Same on my machine. It seems that you found your solution. I would just suggest that before you assign the new keyboard shortcut, you check that it isn't already in use. It is easy as when you enter your selected key into Press-new-shortcut-key box Word lets you know to what it is assigned if anything.

Also, you can overwrite existing assignments like Ctrl+Alt+V; just remember that your customization is local to your machine - you get used to it and when you try to help someone else (like posting in these tips) you may suggest a shortcut that doesn't work for other people. May be that's what happened in this tip. On the other hand these shortcut settings are a mess - my machine (MS365 Family, Win10) uses the older Word shortcuts, not the new ones indicated on the site you linked to.

2023-11-22 11:08:51

Veronica Pavia

Hi Allen, I enjoy receiving your Word and Excel tips.

When I tried using Ctrl + Alt + V to paste just the text, I just ended up at the Paste Special dialogue box (Windows 10 - Office 365).

I tried finding more info online and found the following site: https://insider.microsoft365.com/en-us/blog/paste-text-only-shortcut-in-word. This site explained that MS had changed the shortcut to Ctrl + Shift + V. However, that didn't do anything for me.

I used File / Options / Customize Ribbon dialogue box and used the customize Keyboard Shortcuts function (bottom of the box) to set my own keyboard shortcuts. You might want to mention this to your readers. I had never paid any attention to this function, but I used it to set my own shortcuts for paste using destination formatting and paste text only. I found lots of other things for which I might want to create a keyboard shortcut!

2023-11-20 09:31:11

April Ellis

Thanks for this tip! I almost invariably want the target formatting, so this should save me some time and irritation.

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