Help a N00B?

Hi I was wondering if i could get some help here with a thing I'm trying to create for my workplace. We are a school for special needs children and most of my colleagues can barely turn on a computer. yet we will soon be obliged to a digital workspace. for this we need forms for rapports documentation etc. So we've al decided on Excel for our daily reporting on the work and progress of our pupils. Ideally the Excel sheet wil have 31 tabs for a month, each tab a printable form (A4 size) for us to wrtie stuff into. I've managed to create a cell-les form with closed cells that really looks like what we need. Í've found the developer tab and managed to start a bunch of active-x text fields. but this is were i got stuck.

Everything needs to be closed of for the users to prevent accidents but the text fields need to be usable and have scroll bars for large amounts of text (and also remain readable)

How do i position the active x fields in such a way that they are aligned. Can grow a little bit with much text and also create scroll bars if the text field gets to a certain size.

The form will have 8 or so text fields and it would be good if everything moved down to the second page if the text field grow due to input.

So in short it really needs to work like word but we want excel because we are comfertable with the idea that certain areas can be closed of for editing. Als at some point we will need to do some databasing because we would like to keep track of how often a pupil came to class.

I should mention that this is the first time i really tried to get into Excel but i have no idea where to go... We teachers are a bit to old school i think ;)

I hope somebody would like to take a look at this.

Kind regards

Bram

AttachmentSize
Map1.xls23.5 KB

Thax for the tips so far!

Thax for the tips so far! i've gotten to the point where i can now make a sheet that kinda looks like a piece of paper but how am i going to make the textboxes usable? Ik can lock everything down except the part where one could edit and enter text in the box. yet if i keep on typing the text goes beyond the boundaries of the box.... Just throwing scrollbars at it didnt help.

Can I add my sheet here as an attachement?

Nick's picture

you can indeed add your

you can indeed add your sheet... login, edit post, and you'll see the option to add sheet

OK, i've added it to my

OK, i've added it to my original posting. The textboxes arent aligned yet but my main concern now is how to make 'em usable for texts. Often we have to right lengthy bits if something happened during the day.

Nick's picture

hi Bram to align forms, hold

hi Bram

to align forms, hold down the ALT key when moving them..

also, if you need a lot of text in a cell, you can merge several cells.. select them, right click => alignment => merge cells

to move text to the second page, I think you'll struggle with scrollable forms... merged cells will work

suggest splitting up the fields as much as possible though rather than having one big scrawling text entry..

to lock cells for editing, right click => format cells => protection => locked... then protect the sheet..

good luck.. and keep up the good work with the kids !