How to keep Word Form Field status bar text

We’ve thousands of Word documents to transfer to LibreOffice (and back). Using LibreOffice, we save these doc as odt and enhance the documents contents. Finally, the documents are converted to docx for the end users to use them.

The documents contain Word classic Form Fields, along with Form Field Status Bar text. In the original MS Word documents this text appears in the status bar when the document is protected for form filling, explaining what the user has to insert for that particular field.

For some reason these Form Field status bar annotations get lost in the conversion. Even when saving the odt back to doc/docx, they are gone.

Is there a way to keep these Form Field status bar annotations? Are they still available after conversion to odt? Then how can we access them?
Is there a way to convert them to an alternative function, so that the user can get instructions/help while filling in the forms?

The users won’t accept working without fill in instructions. There are many of them in these documents. A solution is necessary to get LibreOffice acceptance.

Hi @ThierryH,

Good question!

I’m not sure whether it’s a bug or a missing feature that the Form Field status bar annotations go missing during the round-trip conversion process.

It’s possible that we’ve improved our handling of doc/docx files to properly support this feature, so your first stop should be installing/running the latest release of LibreOffice.

If the latest build doesn’t seem to fix this problem, please file a bug and provide a list of steps that can reproduce your problem. The QA Team will be happy to help you track down this issue!

Please post a link to any bugs you file in a comment below using the format “fdo#123456”.

Thanks!