Using a single-click checkbox in Microsoft Word without a protected form

The simplest way to do this is using the Add-In on this site. Otherwise, you will be essentially reconstructing it in your own system, possibly your normal.dot or normal.dotm template.

In Word 2010 and later, you can use checkbox content controls. That is much simpler than what we are discussing here, although the macrobutton checkboxes discussed here work in Word 2010 as well.

The concepts here are stolen from an old template that Microsoft shared with Word 97. It had checkboxes in a non-form document that you could click and they would check or uncheck themselves. It turned out that those checkboxes were in fact macrobutton fields. Further, they were stored as AutoText in the template.

By design, when you click on a macrobutton field it selects the entire field including its displayed content, in this case an empty or checked box. The macro which is run, replaces that field with another macrobutton field, in this case a checked or unchecked box. These fields are stored as AutoText entries.

The default for a macrobutton field is to run the named macro when it is double-clicked. If you have told Word to do so, you can run them from a single click. This requires a separate line of vba which must be run before you try to use the macrobutton.

I have prepared a simple Add-In that you can put in your Word Startup Folder to use these. It has the AutoText as well as the code. If you want to use this effect in your own forms without installing the Add-In, you will need to copy the AutoText entries from the Add-In template to your template along with the code. You could certainly write your own AutoText and code as well.

For a simple document template here is code written for Word 97 that works today (2016).

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Option Explicit 

Sub AutoNew()
 AutoOpen ' so new document responds the same as opened document 
End Sub 

Sub AutoOpen()
 Options.ButtonFieldClicks = 1
 Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
 Selection.NextField.Select 
End Sub 

Sub Check()
 ActiveDocument.AttachedTemplate.AutoTextEntries("Checked Box").Insert _
   Where:=Selection.Range
End Sub 

Sub Uncheck()
 ActiveDocument.AttachedTemplate.AutoTextEntries("Unchecked Box").Insert _
   Where:=Selection.Range 
End Sub 

The AutoText entries are the macrobutton fields.

	Unchecked Box AutoText: { Macrobutton Check ⃞ }
	Checked Box AutoText: { Macrobutton Uncheck ⊠ }

An alternative - Greg Maxey's Macros and Add-Ins

Greg Maxey has a very nice page on this at http://gregmaxey.com/word_tip_pages/add_interactive_toggle_objects_to_document.html.