Notes within each field

Hi all,

This will be a fairly long question, as I don't know the actual term of what I'm trying to refer to here...

I'm forming a spreadsheet which will act as a quote sheet within a business.

This quote sheet will contain pertinent information, such as Fax Number, Phone Number, Address, Product Number, Price, etc.

What I would like to do to make it user-friendly is to have Excel present the word "Address" in the address box in a light-grey, italicized font that would disappear when the user clicks in the box or begins typing the address in the box.

And of course, I'd like to do the same for all the rest of the info too (Phone, Fax, Product, Price, etc.).

Is there any way to do this?

Thanks much!

You could do this with VBA, but overall, because of the complexities associated with code, I would suggest the form would not actually be more usable.

I'd recommend keeping it simple and having Address: in the adjacent cell.

CC

Neat code, notable absence of iifs, and I like that you use '>0' = false to make err.number act as a boolean.

but, to OP, on this:

but it requires users to enable macros

(shg is right, this is my concern)
This means that when a user first opens your workbook, they will probably have their macro security set to high (default) so all they will get is a message telling them that macros have been disabled, that it's probably OK, but this may (will) mean loss of functionality. The understanding most users take from this notification is, "it's broken". In order to preclude this message, users must change thir macro security settings (not hard Tools -> macro -> security -> recommend medium). The options that come up include further warnings about security which will potentially trouble your user. The user must then restart Excel to make the settings take effect, and even after this, assuming the user opts for medium rather than low security, warning messages will still pop up when they open your workbook prompting them to enable or disable the macros, with an implication that if they disable the macros, nothing bad will come of it, but enabling macros may cause the sky to fall on their head. (Unless you sign the VBA project, but we won't go into that here). So... what a lot of fuss for a simple thing, let me explain my reasoning:

You want:
to help users know what to do with your spreadsheet

You proposed:
to have disappearing in-cell prompts (good enough name for me)

Addressing what you want and (ignoring - sorry!) what you proposed, I, and I'm confident the other regulars would support this, have alternative proposals,

I propose:

• Having a simple instruction next to the box (simple, easy, idiot-proof)
• Adding comments to cells (select cell, pres Alt+i, then m) then type what you like in to the comment box
• Adding comments via data validation (select cell, Alt+d,l) then find the "show message when user selects cell" bit). This is a less orthodox way of adding comments but has some advantages - it removes the comment tags, which some think look a bit tacky and it only shows up when you select the cell, whereas the appearance of comments can be coerced by global settings.
• Highlighting all cells you want the user to complete in a particular colour - you could even do this with conditional formatting and value is not ="" so that when the user types something in it changes colour (very affirming)

I believe these achieve what you're trying to do but not in the way you proposed.

CC