Excel 2K form question...

[mcseguy9]

I've created a form in Excel that I want user's to fill out and print from a web page. The page brings up the form in the browser and they can go from cell to cell and fill in the necessary information. Only the cells that they should have access to are unprotected and they are formatted specifically and have validation settings. It's working well in the testing phase but I've noticed something. When the form is filled out and printed and the user then clicks the back button or the close button on the browser they are asked via a dialg box if they want to save the changes, discard the changes, etc. Is there a way to keep this from coming up? We just want them to fill out the form in the browser and print it out. Nothing else needs to be done. Any ideas or ways to do this or am I just stuck?

[Bill in SD, CA]

You might try going here for help:

OzGrid Excel Forum (http://ozgrid.com/forum/index.php)

HTH,
Bill

[DocEvi1]

you are ultimately stuck.

With users never assume that they have the Excel plugin, or that they will appreciate you insisting they use Excel to print the form. Why not look for alternatives such as webpage with txt boxes (can be easily upgraded to be posted online later), a pdf document, rtf doc....I wouldn't use Excel for a form anyhow - it doesn't look good at all.

Stefan

[mcseguy9]

Hey DocEvil, thanks for the reply. All of our user's will have the Excel plugin. Office 2K is the only office suite on any of the PC's. So I'm not worried about that.

I actually started creating (and got most of the way finished with it) the form in FrontPage. The problems I had are that I couldn't get it all to fit on one printed page, everything was just too big (even with the smallest font settings, etc.), and it just wasn't as easy to set it up in as Excel. Excel seemed to me like the obvious choice for setting up something that looked like it needed to look. It was requested that the online form look as much like the real printed form as possible. It looks great with Excel but terrible with FrontPage.

I can't imagine that setting this up in Word or using RTF would look any better, but if it would allow for what I need and not prompt them to save it or close it than it's worth looking at. If you'd like to see my html vs. Excel files let me know and I'll attach them here or email them to you.